Despite decades of notoriety as one of the -filthiest books in the world,- Steve Cannon-s first and only novel, Groove, Bang and Jive Around, has hardly been read since first being published by the Paris-based Ophelia Press in 1969. Due to its scarcity, the New York Press deemed it -an underground classic of such legendary stature that New York-s black cognoscenti have transmogrified the work into urban myth.- This debut, revised for release by Olympia Press in 1971, cemented Cannon-s place as a stalwart of the East Village and key figure in New York-s black avant-garde-inspiring a generation to break with staid literary modernism, according to Cannon-s friend and collaborator Ishmael Reed, for whom its release -signaled a resurfacing of the irreverent, underground trickster tradition of black orature.- Seeped psychedelia and hoodoo, this erotic farce follows Anette, a fourteen-year-old runaway, from the outhouse of a New Orleans juke joint to the land of Oo-bla-dee, a realm of bacchan
