Bøger af James Hannaham

The raucous, irreverent, and heart wrenching story of a transgender woman's re-entry into life on the outside after over twenty years in incarceration told over one whirlwind Fourth of July weekend. Loosely inspired by James Joyce's Ulysses, this is a stylish, inventive tale of belonging, set in the newly gentrified Brooklyn, New York.

Winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award In this “dangerously hilarious” novel (Los Angeles Times), a trans woman reenters life on the outside after more than twenty years in a men’s prison, over one consequential Fourth of July weekend—from the author of the PEN/Faulkner Award winner Delicious Foods. Carlotta Mercedes has been misunderstood her entire life. When she was pulled into a robbery gone wrong, she still went by the name she’d grown up with in Fort Greene, Brooklyn—before it gentrified. But not long after her conviction, she took the name Carlotta and began to live as a woman, an embrace of selfhood that prison authorities rejected, keeping Carlotta trapped in an all-male cell block, abused by both inmates and guards, and often placed in solitary. In her fifth appearance before the parole board, Carlotta is at last granted conditional freedom and returns to a much-changed New York City. Over a whirlwind Fourth of July weekend, she struggles to reconcile with the son she left behind, to reunite with a family reluctant to accept her true identity, and to avoid any minor parole infraction that might get her consigned back to lockup. Written with the same astonishing verve of Delicious Foods, which dazzled critics and readers alike, Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta sweeps the reader through seemingly every street of Brooklyn, much as Joyce’s Ulysses does through Dublin. The novel sings with brio and ambition, delivering a fantastically entertaining read and a cast of unforgettable characters even as it challenges us to confront the glaring injustices of a prison system that continues to punish people long after their time has been served.

In this 'razor-sharp' and 'dangerously hilarious' novel that "hooks readers from the beginning" (Los Angeles Times), a trans woman reenters life on the outside after more than twenty years in a men's prison, over one consequential Fourth of July weekend.

A startling, shape-shifting book of prose and images that draws on an unexpected pair of inspirations—the poetry of Fernando Pessoa and the history of air disasters—to investigate con men, identity politics, failures of leadership, the privilege of ineptitude, the slave trade, and the nature of consciousness.Early in 2017, on a plane from Cape Verde to Lisbon, author and visual artist James Hannaham started reading Pessoa & Co., Richard Zenith's English translation of Fernando Pessoa's selected poetry. This was two months after Trump's presidential election; like many people, ideas about unfitness for service and failures of leadership were on his mind. Imagine his consternation upon discovering the first line of the first poem in the book: "I've never kept sheep/But it's as if I did."The Portuguese, Hannaham had been musing, were responsible for jump-starting colonialism and the slave trade. Pessoa published one book in Portuguese in his lifetime, Mensagem, which consisted of paeans to European explorers. He also invented about seventy-five alter egos, each with a unique name and style, long before aliases and avatars became a feature of modern culture.Hannaham felt compelled to engage with Pessoa's work. Once in Lisbon, he began a practice of reading a poem from Zenith's anthology and responding in whatever mode seemed to click. Even before his trip, however, he had become fascinated by Air Disasters, a TV show that tells the story of different plane crashes in each of its episodes. These stories—as well as the textures and squares of the city he was visiting—began to resonate with his concerns and Pessoa’s, and make their way into the book.Through its inspirations and juxtapositions and its agile shifts of voice and form—from meme to fiction to aphorism to screenshot to lyric—the book leads us to reckon with the most universal questions. What is the self? What holds the self—multiple, fragmented, performative, increasingly algorithmically controlled, constantly under threat of death—intact and aloft?

WINNER OF THE 2016 PEN/FAULKNER AWARD FOR FICTION WINNER OF THE HURSTON/WRIGHT LEGACY FICTION AWARDFINALIST FOR THE 2016 DAYTON LITERARY PEACE PRIZE FINALIST FOR THE LOS ANGELES TIMES PRIZE FOR FICTIONLONGLISTED FOR THE SIMPSON/JOYCE CAROL OATES PRIZENOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR: New York Times, Washington PostA BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: NPR, Kirkus, BuzzFeed, National Post, Kansas City StarTOP 10 BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Publishers WeeklyTOP 15 BOOKS OF THE YEAR: BookPageHeld captive by her employers--and by her own demons--on a mysterious farm, a widow struggles to reunite with her young son in this uniquely American story of freedom, perseverance, and survival.Darlene, once an exemplary wife and a loving mother to her young son, Eddie, finds herself devastated by the unforeseen death of her husband. Unable to cope with her grief, she turns to drugs, and quickly forms an addiction. One day she disappears without a trace.Unbeknownst to eleven-year-old Eddie, now left behind in a panic-stricken search for her, Darlene has been lured away with false promises of a good job and a rosy life. A shady company named Delicious Foods shuttles her to a remote farm, where she is held captive, performing hard labor in the fields to pay off the supposed debt for her food, lodging, and the constant stream of drugs the farm provides to her and the other unfortunates imprisoned there.In Delicious Foods, James Hannaham tells the gripping story of three unforgettable characters: a mother, her son, and the drug that threatens to destroy them. Through Darlene's haunted struggle to reunite with Eddie, through the efforts of both to triumph over those who would enslave them, and through the irreverent and mischievous voice of the drug that narrates Darlene's travails, Hannaham's daring and shape-shifting prose infuses this harrowing experience with grace and humor.The desperate circumstances that test the unshakeable bond between this mother and son unfold into myth, and Hannaham's treatment of their ordeal spills over with compassion. Along the way we experience a tale at once contemporary and historical that wrestles with timeless questions of love and freedom, forgiveness and redemption, tenacity and the will to survive.