Othello Blues

Othello Blues is the one novel on JEF's Harold Jaffe shelf with two lives: first published by FictionNet in 1996, then revised and reissued by JEF Books in 2014. The reissue is the version the press stands behind, the book as Jaffe wanted it left.

Unlike the docufiction collections he is best known for, this is sustained narrative. Jaffe sets Shakespeare's tragedy in a near-future New York City and the Mississippi delta and recasts the principals as a band: Othello, called Otis, on guitar; Cassio on bass; Iago on harmonica and jew's harp; Desdemona as the white wife of Otis. The novel is dedicated to bluesman Robert Johnson and runs on dialect, stage directions, quick cuts, and lean syncopated prose, turning blank verse percussive. Thomas LeClair called it an imaginative, witty, and politically prescient retelling.