After 87 Years, A Radical Novel Of The Harlem Renaissance Finds A Publisher

Claude McKay set aside his novel Romance in Marseille in 1933 because his editor thought it too shocking to sell: its protagonist is a West African double amputee with a prostitute lover, and most of the action is “in a sexually liberated working-class milieu, where queer love is accepted as a fact of life, no more subject to judgment than its heterosexual counterpart.” Penguin Classics has just published it for the first time. – The New York Times