Loving Day by Mat Johnson

Loving Day by Mat Johnson

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK -NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY San Francisco Chronicle NPR Men s Journal The Denver Post Slate Time Out New York-From the author of the critically beloved Pym ( Imagine Kurt Vonnegut having a beer with Ralph Ellison and Jules Verne. Vanity Fair) comes a ruthlessly comic and moving tale of a man discovering a lost daughter, confronting an elusive ghost, and stumbling onto the possibility of utopia.
In the ghetto there is a mansion, and it is my father s house.
Warren Duffy has returned to America for all the worst reasons: His marriage to a beautiful Welsh woman has come apart; his comics shop in Cardiff has failed; and his Irish American father has died, bequeathing to Warren his last possession, a roofless, half-renovated mansion in the heart of black Philadelphia. On his first night in his new home, Warren spies two figures outside in the grass. When he screws up the nerve to confront them, they disappear. The next day he encounters ghosts of a different kind: In the face of a teenage girl he meets at a comics convention he sees the mingled features of his white father and his black mother, both now dead. The girl, Tal, is his daughter, and she s been raised to think she s white.
Spinning from these revelations, Warren sets off to remake his life with a reluctant daughter he s never known, in a haunted house with a history he knows too well. In their search for a new life, he and Tal struggle with ghosts, fall in with a utopian mixed-race cult, and ignite a riot on Loving Day, the unsung holiday for interracial lovers.
A frequently hilarious, surprisingly moving story about blacks and whites, fathers and daughters, the living and the dead, Loving Day celebrates the wonders of opposites bound in love.
Praise for Loving Day
Incisive . . . razor-sharp . . .that rare melange: cerebral comedy with pathos. The vitality of our narrator deserves much of the credit for that. He has the neurotic bawdiness of Philip Roth s Alexander Portnoy; the keen, caustic eye of Bob Jones in Chester Himes s If He Hollers Let Him Go; the existential insight of Ellison s Invisible Man. The New York Times Book Review
Exceptional . . . To say that Loving Day is a book about race is like saying Moby-Dick is a book about whales. . . . Mat Johnson s] unrelenting examination of blackness, whiteness and everything in between is handled with ruthless candor and riotous humor. . . . Even when the novel s family strife and racial politics are at peak intensity, Johnson s comic timing is impeccable. Los Angeles Times
Loving Day is about being blackish in America, a subject about which Johnson has emerged as satirist, historian, spy, social media trickster (follow him on Twitter) and demon-fingered blues guitarist. . . . Johnson, at his best, is a powerful comic observer and] a gifted writer, always worth reading on the topics of race and privilege. Dwight Garner, The New York Times
Hilarious and touching new novel about family, identity and what it means to truly love other people . . . The disasters make us who we are, and the results can sometimes be amazing as amazing as this beautiful, triumphant miracle of a book. NPR
Giddy, biting . . . ferocious . . . Grand metaphors, unsparing social commentary, sharp characters, and sharper humor help propel the book. . . . A welcome effort from a major talent. The Boston Globe

Mat Johnson is the author of the novels Loving Day, Pym, Drop, and Hunting in Harlem, the nonfiction novella The Great Negro Plot, and the graphic novels, Incognegro and Dark Rain. He is a recipient of the United States Artist James Baldwin Fellowship, The Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, and is a Regular Contributor on NPR's Fresh Air. Mat Johnson is a Professor at the University of Houston Creative Writing Program.

Warren Pleece is a comic book artist mostly known for his work on DC Comics Vertigo imprint for titles such as Deadenders, Hellblazer and Incognegro. As well as having worked for the magazine 2000AD, Titan comics Doctor Who series and for numerous publishers including Jonathan Cape, Macmillan and Simon and Shuster, he is also co-creator of comic magazine, Velocity, the graphic novels The Great Unwashed, Montague Terrace and the web series, Alby Figgs.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780812993455
ISBN 10	0812993454
Title	Loving Day
Author	Mat Johnson
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Random House USA Inc
Year published	2015-05-26
Number of pages	304
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.