New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1973. dj. Hardcover first edition - A classic novel about what it means to be a black American - sometimes brutally funny, other times starkly real - as he "sets forth his encounters with poverty, drug addiction, prostitution, venereal disease, murder, bureaucratic indifference, race riots, frustrated rage -and a variety of ways of loving." The third and last novel by this writer, whom Ishmael Reed notably described as "Richard Pryor before there was a Richard Pryor. Richard Pryor on paper." 215 pp. ISBN: 0-374-100365.