The book makes space for rumination, complexity, and transience. It offers a unique window into the mind of one woman, at one moment in history, and by doing so examines beauty, sex, and art through her eyes. Once you get into the flow of Newman’s prose, you’ll find artistic and intellectual riches.
— Kirkus Reviews
A lost masterpiece of American literature about the creative evolution of a young Black woman in California and her intense relationship with an indie filmmaker
Alison Mills Newman’s novel Francisco—“profoundly underappreciated” (NY Times)—has long been out of print and impossible to find. Written in her early twenties in a “fluently funky mix of standard and nonstandard English” (Harryette Mullen), Mills Newman tells the vibrant story of a young black woman’s love affair with an indie filmmaker, Francisco. Described as “a portrait of the artist as a young black woman trying to find a way back to herself” in the new foreword by Saidiya Hartman, Francisco unfolds like an on-the-road diary of a young actress and musician as she becomes increasingly disillusioned with success in Hollywood. She chronicles her bohemian life with her filmmaker lover, visiting friends and family up and down California, and her involvement in the 1970s Black Arts movement. Angela Davis, Muhammad Ali, Pharoah Sanders, Melvin Van Peebles, Frank Silvera, and Amiri Baraka make appearances, along with other artists and writers like Ishmael Reed and Joe Overstreet. Love and friendship, long revealing conversations, parties and dancing in Berkeley and LA—Francisco celebrates “the workins of a positive alive life that is good value, quality, carin, truth . . . the gift of art for the survival of the human heart."
The book makes space for rumination, complexity, and transience. It offers a unique window into the mind of one woman, at one moment in history, and by doing so examines beauty, sex, and art through her eyes. Once you get into the flow of Newman’s prose, you’ll find artistic and intellectual riches.
— Kirkus Reviews
The sentences brim with rebellion and pleasure, creating a sensual odyssey of self-discovery and experience. … This delightfully smart and funny protagonist is a reminder of the difficulty and beauty of a life lived on its own terms.
— Alyssa Songsiridej, The New York Times
The novel blends vernacular riffs with cameos from Reed and Muhammad Ali, Pharoah Sanders and Angela Davis, Melvin Van Peebles and Amiri Baraka.
— Adam Bradley, The New York Times
This brilliant, long out-of-print novel was rescued by (who else?) New Directions…snappy asides and transitions appear as enjambments — pushing the pace forward like the ding of a typewriter carriage. The sensuousness is the point. This latest edition of Francisco gives a new generation of readers the opportunity to think about how little has changed in the culture industry’s relationship of convenience with Black artists.
— Justin Rosier, Vulture
Francisco is driven by its author’s vernacular wit and the narrator’s effort to ‘love an alive life.'
— The New York Times
[Francisco] promises to introduce a new generation of readers to Newman’s innovative and genre-bending story.
— The Millions
When blackness, then and now, is so burdened with pain, it is a blessing to find a story of black lovers, written by a woman learning to love herself as she falls in love with Francisco.
— Harryette Mullen
Mills Newman’s exquisitely distilled novel, Francisco, is the song one would expect Love to be singing these troubled days of the 1970s—a song you cannot have heard before, off-key and haunting, disturbing even in its unfamiliarity.
— William Demby
Mills Newman has done the rare thing: written with beauty, power, and purity about a woman.
— Toni Morrison
Francisco is a freely lustful text, rhapsodizing over the allure of the narrator’s new man (a 'black adonis in shorts'), from the thoughts in his head to his high-heeled blue shoes.
— Sophia Nguyen, The Washington Post
Francisco coincided with second-wave feminism and the Black Power and Black Arts movements, and the content and style of the book draw on those currents. The novel’s defining traits are its experimental structure and its vernacular syntax. Mills Newman writes in lilting first-person sentences that lurch and flow like a jazz vamp.
