Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories
Fiction & Related items

LOVING DAY

Mat Johnson

LOVING DAY—the new novel from the author of the critically beloved PYM. LOVING DAY is a brilliant and biting ghost story about family, real estate, and the dream of utopia -- for readers of inventive comic writers who play with issues of identity, from Jonathan Lethem to Victor LaValle.

Warren Duffy has returned to America for all the worst reasons: his marriage to a beautiful Welsh woman has come apart; his comic shop in Cardiff has failed; and his Irish-American father has died, bequeathing to Warren his last possession, a roofless, half-renovated mansion in the heart of black Philadelphia. On his first night in his new home, Warren spies two figures in the grass outside; when he screws up the courage to confront them, they disappear.

The next day he encounters ghosts of a different kind: in the face of the teenage girl he meets at a comics convention he sees the mingled features of his white father and his black mother, both now dead. The girl is his daughter and she thinks she's white. Warren sets off to remake his life with a reluctant daughter he never knew and a haunted house and history he knows too well. In their search for a new life they struggle with an unwanted house and its ghosts, fall in with a utopian mixed-race cult, and inspire a riot on Loving Day, the unsung holiday that celebrates interracial love.

This is a fresh, irreverent, and timely take on mixed-race identity -- it sends up the movement of mixed-race identity, while also provoking fascinating questions about what racial identity in America really means and signifies. Mat Johnson is himself biracial and has often written around these issues in his work; this is his first head-on examination of the subject and the results are explosive, not to mention darkly comic.

Mat Johnson last novel, PYM (Spiegel & Grau, 2011), was an underground critical hit (rights available via Watkins Loomis). It was a book of the year in The Washington Post, Vanity Fair, Salon, and several other newspapers; Maud Newton nominated it for that year's unclaimed Pulitzer for fiction in the New York Times Magazine; Jonathan Lethem called it “hilarious and provocative” in Rolling Stone's “Things That Should Be Big” issue; and Maureen Corrigan called it “inventive, socially sassy, loony, and sharp” on “Fresh Air” on NPR. Mat also has a wildly popular twitter feed with approximately 60k followers. Also an accomplished graphic novelist, he teaches at the University of Houston Creative Writing Program.

Available products
Book Published 2015-06-02 by Spiegel & Grau
Book Published 2015-06-02 by Spiegel & Grau

Comments

This is what happens when races mix: Mat Johnson. Not a soul or a post-soul is spared in his brilliant and hilarious satire of modern American tribalism.

Hilarious and provocative.

…a social satire that chronicles its protagonist’s quest for wholeness and adulthood. Grand metaphors, unsparing social commentary, sharp characters, and sharper humor help propel the book far beyond that potentially yawn-inducing categorization.

Since this is a book by Mat Johnson, one of the best American satirists since Mark Twain, I don't have to tell you it's as funny as it is smart. Instead, I'll just say it's the most poignant father/daughter story I've read in years. With great daring, and great care, Loving Day picks through the debris of the broke down haunted house of our racial past to ask what treasures are worth salvaging for the next generation.

The novel ultimately triumphs because it is razor-sharp, sci-fi-flavored satire in the vein of George Schuyler, playfully evocative of black folklore à la Joel Chandler Harris — yet it never feels like a cold theoretical exercise. “Loving Day” is that rare mélange: cerebral comedy with pathos. The vitality of our narrator deserves much of the credit for that. He has the neurotic bawdiness of Philip Roth’s Alexander Portnoy; the keen, caustic eye of Bob Jones in Chester Himes’s If He Hollers Let Him Go; the existential insight of Ellison’s Invisible Man. Read more...

Mat’s original piece is up on Buzzfeed (Mulatto) Read more...

Writers who are as smart as Mat Johnson are rarely as funny, and those who are as funny, rarely as smart. He is unique, and simply must be read. Loving Day—a tender, ribald, fast-moving novel about the strangeness of in-betweenness, the collision of fear and desire, and the impossibility of going back home—is the perfect place to begin.

Interview Read more...

It just seems to me the white Mat Johnson can’t agree on anything the black Mat Johnson says.

Hilarious, sometimes uncomfortable, always brilliant, Loving Day tackles identity, family, and finding that elusive place where you belong with such sly humor and so much heart. An awesome, viciously witty novel.

Blisteringly funny

Authors usually don't love it when you compare them to dead writers, but it's really hard to talk about Mat Johnson and mention that he's pretty much the contemporary writer people should read if they really miss Kurt Vonnegut. Here, in his latest novel, race and family are explored in sometimes hilarious and almost always moving ways.

Mat Johnson's hilarious and touching new novel about family, identity and what it means to truly love other people….

Outrageously entertaining...reminiscent of Philip Roth in its seemingly effortless blend of the serious, comic, and fantastic.

Imagine Kurt Vonnegut having a beer with Ralph Ellison and Jules Verne.

Genius! Mat Johnson is hands-down one of my favorite novelists writing today. He writes about the difficult stuff--the stuff that matters--in the most humorous and heart-wrenching way. Loving Day--a delicious romp of a tale about the mixed-race experience--is Johnson's triumph and a reader's great joy.

The sharpest and most unusual story I read last year...Johnson's satirical vision roves as freely as Kurt Vonnegut's and is colored with the same sort of passionate humanitarianism.