Serious Music

In 1918, Arthur Champion is one of a handful of Black students attending the Oberlin Conservatory of Music when he runs afoul of a vindictive professor and finds himself unceremoniously enlisted in the United States Army. What ensues is one man’s sweeping voyage through the decade, a kaleidoscopic view of America during seismic social shifts.

A brilliant interrogation of racism and ownership in art, Serious Music is a breakneck, high-octane read, thrumming with the electrifying humor and rigorous moral clarity that is the hallmark of this masterful writer’s contribution to American letters.

A thrilling, darkly comic journey of a Black musician making his way from the trenches of the Somme, to the jazz clubs of Harlem, to the illicit inner sanctum of Woodrow Wilson’s White House.

Endorsements

By the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award–winning author of James.

“Our current Great American Novelist.” — The Chicago Tribune