“There are master works here . . . But there is also an edgy silent harshness, a world held together by yearning and regret, where desire is met with smothered instinct, hope with mocking laughter. Quietly touching, stealthily brain-rattling. Feeling and thought is what Bullins offers. However bitter, it’s good for us.”
—Amiri Baraka, from the Preface

“Ed Bullins’s words are heavy as stones—beautiful colored stones coming from the sea, hitting our skin—hurting, smarting, nurturing right down to the bones where sainthood is impossible. He anoints us with young black men on their knees exposing themselves to an American hunger impossible to satisfy. He posits black women shimmering in the night to an acrobatic tune of loneliness. How to pray when he causes us to howl with laughter and pain? How to pray indeed as his words continue to mark time with his insistent heart. What an honor to read your prose again, my dear brother.”
—Sonia Sanchez

“A richness of language and observation pervades this collection of short stories by a black writer about real black people.”
—New York Times Book Review

“Knowledge of craft and technique distinguishes the collection of short fiction by Ed Bullins. Reading like an odyssey of one man’s experiences of the world . . .”
—Addison Gayle, author of The Black Aesthetic

“For true students and fans of American and African-American literature of the 1960s and ’70s, Ed Bullins is one of our indisputable heavyweight champs. Yes, we know him as the legendary, controversial, provocative, and award-winning playwright, but there is a reason why his plays always have such musicality, why his characters pulse with a social realism only the most gifted scribes can capture—it is because Bullins, too, is a magnificent fiction writer. This reissue of The Hungered One is a lost-found treasure. In it, Bullins is a rapper, a spoken-word artist, spitting lyrics across time, space, geography, and into the souls of the people—you, us, yesterday, and now.”
—Kevin Powell, author of No Sleep Till Brooklyn: New and Selected Poems