(Twelve original and interconnected stories in the traditi...)
Twelve original and interconnected stories in the traditions of Junot Díaz and Sherman Alexie. Victor D. LaValle's astonishing, violent, and funny debut offers harrowing glimpses at the vulnerable lives of young people who struggle not only to come of age, but to survive the city streets. In "ancient history," two best friends graduating from high school fight to be the one to leave first for a better world; each one wants to be the fortunate son.
(Anthony James weighs 315 pounds, is possibly schizophreni...)
Anthony James weighs 315 pounds, is possibly schizophrenic, and he’s just been kicked out of college. He’s rescued by his mother, sister, and grandmother, but they may not be altogether sane themselves. Living in the basement of their home in Queens, New York, Anthony is armed with nothing but wicked sarcasm and a few well-cut suits. He intends to make horror movies but takes the jobs he can handle, cleaning homes and factories, and keeps crossing paths with a Japanese political prisoner, a mysterious loan shark named Ishkabibble, and packs of feral dogs.
(A fiendishly imaginative comic novel about doubt, faith, ...)
A fiendishly imaginative comic novel about doubt, faith, and the monsters we carry within us. Ricky Rice was as good as invisible: a middling hustler, recovering dope fiend, and traumatized suicide cult survivor running out the string of his life as a porter at a bus depot in Utica, New York.
(From one of the most acclaimed young writers of fiction i...)
From one of the most acclaimed young writers of fiction in America today comes a fast-paced and fantastical novella about a young girl’s journey into a dark netherworld to find her missing best friend.
(Pepper is a rambunctious big man, minor-league troublemak...)
Pepper is a rambunctious big man, minor-league troublemaker, working-class hero (in his own mind), and, suddenly, the surprised inmate of a budget-strapped mental institution in Queens, New York. He’s not mentally ill, but that doesn’t seem to matter. He is accused of a crime he can’t quite square with his memory.
(People move to New York looking for magic and nothing wil...)
People move to New York looking for magic and nothing will convince them it isn't there. Charles Thomas Tester hustles to put food on the table, keep the roof over his father's head, from Harlem to Flushing Meadows to Red Hook. He knows what magic a suit can cast, the invisibility a guitar case can provide, and the curse written on his skin that attracts the eye of wealthy white folks and their cops.
(Four new Lovecraftian tales told by four amazing talents ...)
Four new Lovecraftian tales told by four amazing talents in this bundle. Reimagining Lovecraft. Government agents, monstrous P.I.s, walkers of dreams and magical hustlers meet in the pages of this astonishing anthology of four novellas.
(Akai and the Monster feud over the fate of the new Dr. Fr...)
Akai and the Monster feud over the fate of the new Dr. Frankenstein, Josephine Baker. But just outside the remote Montana cabin, sinister forces arrive to eradicate any survivors of the battle…
(Final issue! In the wreckage of the Lab, Frankenstein’s M...)
Final issue! In the wreckage of the Lab, Frankenstein’s Monster faces off against Akai with the fate of the world and the family lineage hanging in the balance.
(As government forces close in on Akai, Dr. Baker, and the...)
As government forces close in on Akai, Dr. Baker, and the Monster, the Director unleashes a new player in the race to help capture the Frankenstein family.
(The legacy of Frankenstein’s monster collides with the so...)
The legacy of Frankenstein’s monster collides with the sociopolitical tensions of the present-day United States. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein beseeched his creator for love and companionship, but in 2017, the monster has long discarded any notions of peace or inclusion. He has become the Destroyer, his only goal to eliminate the scourge of humanity from the planet. In this goal, he initially finds a willing partner in Dr. Baker, a descendant of the Frankenstein family who has lost her teenage son after an encounter with the police.
(A glittering landscape of twenty-five speculative stories...)
A glittering landscape of twenty-five speculative stories that challenge oppression and envision new futures for America - from N. K. Jemisin, Charles Yu, Jamie Ford, G. Willow Wilson, Charlie Jane Anders, Hugh Howey, and more.
Victor LaValle is an American writer. He is the author of a short-story collection, Slapboxing with Jesus, four novels, The Ecstatic, Big Machine, The Devil in Silver & The Changeling, and two novellas, Lucretia and the Kroons and The Ballad of Black Tom.
Background
Victor LaValle was born on February 3, 1972, in New York, New York, United States.
He grew up in Flushing and Rosedale, Queens, New York. He was raised by a single mother who had emigrated from Uganda in her twenties.
Education
Victor D. LaValle attended Lawrence Woodmere Academy in New York.
He went on to earn a degree in English from Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, United States.
He earned a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Columbia University, New York, United States.
LaValle's debut work is a collection of twelve somewhat interrelated stories that take place in Manhattan, Queens, and the Bronx in the 1990s. The characters who populate the two sections of Slapboxing with Jesus are black, white, Latino, and Asian boys. The first section, "The Autobiography of New York Today" contains the more extreme subject matter. In "ancient history" Ahab decides to join the military as an outlet for his violence, and in "Raw Daddy" Sean engages in dangerous sex. In "Getting Ugly" a young computer programmer falls in love with a beautiful hooker. A teen bisexual prostitute who works from the sidewalk in front of a Disney store in Times Square wants to change his life in "Slave." The second section, "One Boy’s Beginnings," contains "Trinidad," in which Anthony, a multiracial teen, is sent by his mother back to Trinidad as a punishment, but the boy is hoping to shed his developing homosexuality there. In Trinidad Anthony finds liberation, and when his mother comes to take him home, he panics. Anthony is featured in the last seven stories. He attempts to avoid brutality in "Chuckie" and "Kids on Colden Street." Anthony tries to strengthen the bond with his father in "Pops," witnesses his mother’s daydreaming in "How I Lost My Inheritance," and deals with his ethnicity and sexuality in "Who Did We Worship?"
Ray Sawhill wrote in the New York Times Hook Review that it could be said that LaValle "has found a way to give linguistic form to the brain patterns of media-soaked, post-PC street youth." Sawhill, who compared the book to hip-hop videos, felt that readers who don’t feel literature should come from a boombox may find the book "tediously juvenile." Cecil Brown wrote in Village Voice that for the characters in LaValle’s world, the city is a prison that limits goals and stunts growth. The city itself becomes a character, one that never stops making its presence known - and one that turns its concrete back on its inhabitants." Brown wrote that LaValle "often describes the confusion of the city by way of teens’ developing sexuality." Brown used as an example the story "Class Trip," about three tenth graders who go from Queens to Manhattan to find a prostitute. The hooker accommodates the first two boys, then robs and turns away Anthony. When he asks her why, she replies, "I don’t like your face. You just don’t look good." Brown noted that the "whore’s put-down turns out to be much more frightening than being robbed." Brown also commented that LaValle, like James Joyce, uses a dash rather than quotation marks to indicate a speaker and said this can be confusing to the reader. Brown concluded that LaValle’s book "is first-rate and it reminds us that by accepting our ugliness, our imperfections, we have a chance to become beautiful."
Quotations:
"I understand the impulse to depict members of historically oppressed groups as righteous, purely good, but it’s a mistake. Or at least it’s bad writing."
"I’ve always been the writer I wanted to be, it’s just that the writer I want to be has changed."
"The only think that separates a writer from a non-writer is that the non-writer gives up."
Personality
Victor LaValle once told in the interview: "Most writers, their inborn personalities, don’t seem all that joyful. We’re mopes. We’re whiners. We’re narcissists of a very high order. I certainly have all those traits. Had them ever since I was pretty young. But the two times when those traits seem to be held at bay are when I’m reading and when I’m writing. Maybe the reading part is obvious. When the book is good I willfully lose myself in those pages. I forget my appointments and anxieties and just keep turning pages. For me, this is clearly joy."
Quotes from others about the person
“One of our most talented young writers.” - Charles Baxter
“LaValle is as much wry fabulist as he is dogged allegorist, and his flights of grim fancy are tethered by acute observations. He can be awfully funny, too. [His] devilish fable renders the visible world - of science, social hierarchies, and New York Times headlines - a load of cultish hooey.” - Bookforum
“If the literary Gods mixed together Haruki Murakami and Ralph Ellison, and threw in several fistfuls of 21st-century attitude, the result would be Victor LaValle. Big Machine is a wonderful, original, and crazy novel.” - Anthony Doerr, author of The Shell Collector and About Grace
“Sure to up his critical standing while furthering comparisons to Haruki Murakami, John Kennedy Toole, and Edgar Allan Poe. Ricky’s intoxicating voice - robust, organic, wily - is perfect for narrating LaValle’s high-stakes mashup of thrilling paranormal and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, as the fateful porter - something of a modern Odysseus rallied by a team of ‘spiritual X-men’ - wanders through America’s ‘messianic hoo-hah.’” - Publishers Weekly
"Victor LaValle tels stories that need to be told." - Joe Hill
Interests
Writers
H. P. Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson, Ambrose Bierce, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, African American literature, Black Diaspora literature, US literary realism.
Music & Bands
Duran Duran, Killer Mike
Connections
Victor LaValle is married to a novelist Emily Raboteau. The couple has two children.