Michael Thomas: The Broken King, Kartoniert / Broschiert

Klappentext

'There's a bridge of beautiful American prose-lyrical, powerful, fearlessly candid-running straight from James Baldwin to Thomas, who is obviously Baldwin's worthy heir . . . An utterly immersive book'Francisco Goldman, author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist Monkey Boy

From the author of Man Gone Down -a New York Times Top Ten Book of the Year and winner of the Dublin Literary Award-comes a deeply personal memoir of race, trauma, alcoholism, parenting, mental illness and ultimately hope in a portrait of three generations of Black American men

In 2007, Michael Thomas launched into the literary world with his award-winning first novel Man Gone Down , a beautiful and devastating story of a Black father trying to claim a piece of the American Dream. Called "powerful and moving . . . an impressive success," by Kaiama L. Glover on the cover of the New York Times Book Review , Thomas' debut introduced a writer of prodigious and rare talent. In his long-awaited encore and first work of nonfiction, The Broken King, Thomas explores fathers and sons, lovers and the beloved, trauma and recovery, success and failure in a unique, urgent, and timeless memoir.

The title is borrowed from T. S. Eliot's line in "Little Gidding": "If you came at night like a broken king," and the work ponders the process of being broken. Akin to Baldwin's The Fire Next Time or Nabokov's Speak, Memory , Thomas' memoir unfolds through six powerful, interlocking and overlaying parts focusing on the lives of five men: his father-a philosopher, Boston Red Sox fan, and absent parent; his estranged older brother; his two sons growing up in Brooklyn; and always, heartbreakingly himself. At the center of The Broken Kingis the story of Thomas' own breakdown, a result of inherited family history and his own experiences, from growing up Black in the Boston suburbs to publishing a prize-winning novel with "the house of Beckett."

Every page of The Broken Kingrings with the impact of America's sweeping struggle with race and class, education and family, and builds to a brave, meticulous articulation of a creative mind's journey into and out of madness.