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Sign up todayLong Division
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“Kiese Laymon became a favorite author of mine in 2022 when I read his memoir Heavy. Long Division is his first work of fiction and I was completely mesmerized by this quirky, sci-fi, romp through time. As is typical with Laymon’s writing, this book includes meditations on family, race, and identity, but this time it’s coming to you through the lens of a young man growing up in the south. My favorite thing about Long Division is the way Laymon celebrates love in all of its forms, from the love we have for our families, to the love we have for our “arch nemesis.” The moral of the story being, there are infinite ways to love someone. I would recommend Long Division to fans of books like Erasure (Everett), Interior Chinatown (Yu), and 1Q84 (Murakami).”
— Britt • Ruby's Books
Winner of the NAACP Image Award for Fiction
From Kiese Laymon, author of the critically acclaimed memoir Heavy, comes a “funny, astute, searching” (The Wall Street Journal) debut novel about Black teenagers that is a satirical exploration of celebrity, authorship, violence, religion, and coming of age in post-Katrina Mississippi.
Written in a voice that’s alternately humorous, lacerating, and wise, Long Division features two interwoven stories. In the first, it’s 2013: after an on-stage meltdown during a nationally televised quiz contest, fourteen-year-old Citoyen “City” Coldson becomes an overnight YouTube celebrity. The next day, he’s sent to stay with his grandmother in the small coastal community of Melahatchie, where a young girl named Baize Shephard has recently disappeared.
Before leaving, City is given a strange book without an author called Long Division. He learns that one of the book’s main characters is also named City Coldson—but Long Division is set in 1985. This 1985-version of City, along with his friend and love interest, Shalaya Crump, discovers a way to travel into the future, and steals a laptop and cellphone from an orphaned teenage rapper called...Baize Shephard. They ultimately take these items with them all the way back to 1964, to help another time-traveler they meet to protect his family from the Ku Klux Klan.
City’s two stories ultimately converge in the work shed behind his grandmother’s house, where he discovers the key to Baize’s disappearance. Brilliantly “skewering the disingenuous masquerade of institutional racism” (Publishers Weekly), this dreamlike “smart, funny, and sharp” (Jesmyn Ward), novel shows the work that young Black Americans must do, while living under the shadow of a history “that they only gropingly understand and must try to fill in for themselves” (The Wall Street Journal).
Born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi, Kiese Laymon is the Ottilie Schillig Professor in English and Creative Writing at the University of Mississippi and author of the novel Long Division, the memoir Heavy, and the essay collection How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America. He was recently named a 2022 MacArthur Fellow.
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Audiobook details
Author:
Kiese Laymon
Narrators:
Ruffin Prentiss III & Jaime Lincoln Smith
ISBN:
9781797190693
Length:
8 hours 10 minutes
Language:
English
Publisher:
Simon & Schuster Audio
Publication date:
June 25, 2024
Edition:
Unabridged
Libro.fm rank:
#16,685 Overall
Genre rank:
#1,532 in Historical Fiction