The Magic Keys by Albert Murray (i wanna iguana read aloud txt) 📗

So here again, it’s the metaphor that generates either the bliss or the banality! Thus one person’s restriction may be another person’s incentive! What one person may perceive as the outer limits of all that really matters (as the Chinese once dismissed whatever was beyond the Great Wall), another group of people may regard as the come-hither region of ever more promising horizons of aspiration.

In all events, that certainly strikes me as the snapshot of a fairy-tale princess you sent along with your update, my all too obviously lucky old cut buddy. So cross your fingers and touch your talisman and polish your wiles to their highest sheen. Who ever said that romance was not a game of chance?

Nor should you ever be unmindful of any of those slapdash— slapstick, nay, downright farcical escapades and labyrinthine misadventures old ever so jam-riff-clever Odysseus himself had to maneuver his way out of and back on course to and through the gateway to the remembered hometown boy blue bliss with the one for whom he had forsaken all others not only in Ithaca but everywhere else.

Albert Murray

THE MAGIC KEYS

Albert Murray is the author of The Omni-Americans, Stomping the Blues, The Hero and the Blues, South to a Very Old Place , Conjugations and Reiterations, and From the Briarpatch File. He is the coauthor of Good Morning Blues: The Autobiography of Count Basie and the coeditor of Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray. He lives in New York City.

ALSO BY ALBERT MURRAY

The Omni-Americans

South to a Very Old Place

The Hero and the Blues

Train Whistle Guitar

Stomping the Blues

Good Morning Blues:

The Autobiography of Count Basie (as told to Albert Murray)

The Spyglass Tree

The Seven League Boots

The Blue Devils of Nada

Trading Twelves:

The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray

(edited by Albert Murray and John F. Callahan)

From the Briarpatch File

Conjugations and Reiterations

FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, JULY 2006

Copyright © 2005 by Albert L. Murray

Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage International and

colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents

either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used

fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events,

or locales is entirely coincidental.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Pantheon edition

as follows:

Murray, Albert.

The magic keys / Albert Murray.

p. cm.

1. African American men—Fiction. 2. Graduate students—Fiction.

3. New York (N.Y.)—Fiction. 4. Married people—Fiction.

5. Young men—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3563.U764M34 2005

813’.54—dc22

2004060128

www.vintagebooks.com

www.randomhouse.com

eISBN: 978-0-307-42895-0

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