Fitzcarraldo to re-publish Williams' literary 'masterpiece'

Fitzcarraldo will re-publish The Man Who Cried I Am, an "exceptional" literary thriller from John A Williams, originally published in 1967.

Publisher Jacques Testard acquired UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, from the Barbara Hogenson Agency representing the estate of Williams. Editor Joely Day will publish the novel in April 2024 as part of the publisher’s classics list following the Library of America’s reissue in the US in November 2023. Fitzcarraldo are representing translation rights for the novel with Brazilian rights already sold to Companhia das Letras via Marina Penalva at Casanovas & Lynch.

Fitzcarraldo will re-publish the "masterpiece" with a foreword by Ishmael Reed and an introduction by Merve Emre about "how this explosive novel laid bare America’s racial fault lines". The Man Who Cried I Am follows Max Reddick who, terminally ill, discovers "explosive" government documents outlining the "King Alfred" plan and must risk everything to get them to the one man who can help. The publisher continued: "Greeted as a masterpiece when it was published in 1967, The Man Who Cried I Am stakes out a range of experience rarely seen in American fiction: from the life of a Black GI to the ferment of postcolonial Africa to an insider’s view of Washington politics in the era of segregation and the Civil Rights Movement, including fictionalized portraits of Martin Luther King, Jr, and Malcolm X."

Testard commented: "Chester Himes’ description of the novel as ’blockbuster, a hydrogen bomb’ still feels pertinent – it’s such an ambitious, playful and radical text, and also a great pleasure to read. I deeply admire the style, the structure, the dialogue (such a difficult thing to pull off) and also the novel’s international dimension, as well as its seriousness of intent. I’ve never read anything like it, and cannot think of another book that so well captures what it must have been like to have been a Black intellectual in the post-war period."

Day added: "It’s an honour to be reissuing The Man Who Cried I Am and to be introducing John A Williams to readers in the UK and Ireland. It immediately struck me as being a work of great literary, social and political importance and, sadly, as having so much resonance with the present day, in which Black bodies are still subject to violence and suspicion at the hands of the state on a daily basis."