kiese laymon

Structure over substance

Long Division by Kiese Laymon

February 15, 2022 by Mobius_Walker Leave a Comment

I’m going to be really honest with y’all. I picked this book up for cover and description of hte structure alone. But I mean, come on. That’s an intriguing and beautiful cover. And as for the structure: this novel is told in two books. Book 1 is read like a normal book, from the front to about halfway through. To read Book 2, the reader has to turn the book over to the back and read from the back cover as if it’s the front. […]

I wanted to tell you a lie.

Heavy by Kiese Laymon

January 24, 2019 by vel veeter Leave a Comment

I read Kiese Laymon’s novel Long Division and his nonfiction essays How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others a few years back and I could tell by the early previews and even the cover of this book that it was likely to be very good. And it is. There’s a handful of comparisons on the cover of this book from early reviewers to Richard Wright’s Black Boy, which is also subtitled “American Hunger” and while I do agree there’s some real connections between the two, one of the […]

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