Showing results by author "Kiese Laymon" in All Categories

A gutting and powerful new memoir from a master of the form, Good, God probes Laymon's relationships with three generations of women in his life—his grandmother, his former partner, and his unborn daughter. When Kiese Laymon’s former partner invites him to help her create a child in the age...

**The 2022 Lammy Award Winner in Transgender Nonfiction** Exploring the intersections of Blackness, gender, fatness, health, and the violence of policing. To live in a body both fat and Black is to exist at the margins of a society that creates the conditions for anti-fatness as anti-Blackness...

Author and essayist Kiese Laymon is one of the most unique, stirring, and powerful new voices in American social and cultural commentary. How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America is a collection of Laymon's essays, touching on subjects ranging from family, race, violence, and celebrity to music, writing, and coming of age in the rural Mississippi Gulf Coast. Laymon's writing is unflinchingly honest, while also being smart, lacerating, and unexpectedly funny.

Kiese Laymon grew up a hard-headed black son to a complicated and brilliant black mother in Jackson, Mississippi. From his early experiences of sexual violence, to his suspension from college, to his career as a young college professor, Laymon charts his complex relationship with his mother, grandmother, abuse, anorexia, obesity, sex, writing and ultimately gambling. In Heavy, by attempting to name secrets and lies that he and his mother spent a lifetime avoiding, Laymon asks himself, his mother, his nation and us to confront the terrifying possibility that few know how to love responsibly.

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of bone written and read by Yrsa Daley-Ward, with a foreword read by Kiese Laymon. OBSERVER BOOK OF THE YEAR 2017 'You will come away bruised. You will come away bruised but this will give you poetry.' Raw and stark, the poems in Yrsa Daley-Ward's...

A gripping exploration of the joys, hardships, and truths of Black students through intimate, honest dialogues and stunning photography, author of Heavy “A radical, reverential, and restorative document of community.”—Rebecca Bengal, author of Strange Hours: Photography, Memory, and the...

A New York Times Notable Book A revised collection with thirteen essays, including six new to this edition and seven from the original edition, by the “star in the American literary firmament, with a voice that is courageous, honest, loving, and singularly beautiful” (NPR). Brilliant and...

A lyrical audiobook from the award-winning author of Heavy, about three Black boys who form a deep connection during a transformative summer trip down South to visit family. On the ground of that garden, covered in vegetables and dirt, coated in laughter, I want to say that the Mississippi and...

*Selected as One of the Best Books of the 21st Century by The New York Times* *Winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal and Finalist for the Kirkus Prize* *Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, Publishers Weekly, NPR, Broadly, BuzzFeed, and more* The powerful, provocative...

Winner of the NAACP Image Award for Fiction From the 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...

“yrsa daley-ward’s bone is a symphony of breaking and mending. . . . she lays her hands on the pulse of the thing. . . . an expert storyteller. of the rarest. and purest kind.” —nayyirah waheed, author of salt. From the celebrated poet Yrsa Daley-Ward, a poignant collection of poems...