Long Division: A Novel

(Hardback)

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Description

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 thats alternately humorous, lacerating, and wise, Long Division features two interwoven stories. In the first, its 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, hes 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 books main characters is also named City Coldsonbut 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.

Citys two stories ultimately converge in the work shed behind his grandmothers house, where he discovers the key to Baizes 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).

Reviews

Printed for the first time in the reversible format Laymon always wanted,Long Divisionshines brighter than ever.
Esquire

"Originally published in 2013 and reissued here in a newly revised edition, this debut novel by the author of the memoirHeavyis a time-traveling metafictional romp set in Mississippi that probes fame, creativity and the toll of racism."
New York Times"New and Noteworty"

"Amust-read.Long Divisioncenters on City Coldson, a 14-year-old whose viral outburst on national television earns him a one-way ticket to stay with his grandmother by the sea. Its not supposed to be fun and games, but when City begins to read a mysterious, anonymously published book about a time traveler who shares his name, he finds himself pulled unexpectedly into a temporal mystery."
Bustle

"Kiese Laymon is a singular voice in American literature."
Chicago Tribune

The reissue of Kiese LaymonsLong Divisionechoes a familiar Black church precept of doing your first works over. In this new iteration of his 2013 debut novel, Laymon separates the story into two books, or testaments[Long Division] forth the open-ended question: To what length would you go to save your family and yourself, even if it meant the destruction of another
Chapter 16

"Originally published in 2013 and reissued here in a newly revised edition, this debut novel by the author of the memoir Heavy is a time-traveling metafictional romp set in Mississippi that probes fame, creativity and the toll of racism."
New York Times"New and Noteworty"

A revised version of Laymons elliptical, time-folding work of metafiction about Southern racism...is effectively two novels, both potent yet often funny character studies.In style and structure, Laymons novel is an inheritor to Black postmodern literature of the 1960s and '70sToni Morrison most famously but also Leon Forrest, Gayl Jones, and William Melvin Kelley.A sui generis.
Kirkus

"Don't miss Kiese Laymon'sLong Division. One Mississippi town with two engaging stories in two very different decades. The sharp humor and deep humanity make this debut novel unforgettable."
Melissa Harris-Perry, MSNBC

"Funny, astute and searching.... The author's satirical instincts are excellent."
Sam Sacks,Wall Street Journal

"WithLong Division, Laymon gives us a story that embodies the ellipsis, the idea of an understood but unspoken beginning and ending. Narratives very rarely end; they go through edits and revisions. Characters are added and erased. For a book that begins with a grammar and language competition,Long Divisionfittingly ends with a statement about language, and that statement is that language, like history, never stops moving forward."
Los Angeles Review of Books

"A little fantasy, a little mystery and a lot hilarious."
Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"In a multilayered, allusion-packed, time-traveling plot set in Mississippi,Long Divisiontakes us, nesting-doll-style, from 2013 to 1985, 1964, and back, engaging complex questions of race, violence, gender, sexuality, and our relationship to history. More than anything, Laymon shows with surprising lucidity how American racialized inequality is persistent but mutable, that the past is not the present, but isnt, either, entirely past."
The Boston Review

"Kiese Laymon is an amazing, courageous and brave novelist and essayist.... Laymon fiercely tackles issues of prejudice, adolescence and love with a swagger and confidence all his own. You rarely find novels this honest and engaging. Read this book."
Michigan Quarterly Review

"Laymons voice is unique, a rarity in an era during which fiction tends all too often to chase trends.... At times touching, at times poignant, Laymon more than once strikes a beautiful chord in the midst of what often feels gritty and intentionally provocative. Those touching insights makeLong Divisionworth the effort, and readers who stick with the story (stories, actually) will find themselves thinking about City and the people in his life long after they close the book."
Chicago Book Review

"Long Divisionis a serious book about race and love with a thread of humor running through it, emerging largely from Laymon's wordplay and the cultural gaps that exist between characters from the past, present and future. With roots in Southern and African American literature,Long Divisionis an historical novel that touches on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and a work of magical realism in the tradtion of Haruki Murakami."
Contemporary Literature

"A novel within a novelhilarious, moving and occasionally dizzying.... Laymon cleverly interweaves his narrative threads and connects characters in surprising and seemingly impossible ways. Laymon moves us dazzlingly ... from 1964 to 1985 to 2013 and incorporates themes of prejudice, confusion and love rooted in an emphatically post-Katrina world."
Kirkus Reviews

"Laymons debut novel is an ambitious mix of contemporary southern gothic with Murakamiesque magical realism ... the book elegantly showcases Laymons command of voice and storytelling skill in a tale that is at once dreamlike and concrete, personal and political."
Booklist

"[One of] our best books of the year so far ... Laymans debut novel is bursting with colloquial language from three generations of Mississippi African Americans, mixed with gut-piercing truths about a long racial divide that persists to this day."
School Library Journal

"Smart and funny and sharp ... I loved it."
Jesmyn Ward, author of Sing, Unburied, Sing

"[An] ambitious novel ... it is the most exciting book Ive read all year. Theres nothing like it, both in terms of the scope of what the book tackles and the writings Afro Surrealist energy."
Roxane Gay,author ofDifficult WomenandHunger

Smart, exciting and energetic ... the language romps and roars along through some truly wonderful comic scenes and yet the book doesnt hesitate to comment seriously on questions that matter to human beings everywhere, not just in rural Mississippi.
Victor LaValle, author ofBig MachineandSlapboxing with Jesus

"Long Divisionfinally gave me what Ive wanted to see in contemporary southern literature. For years Ive complained about no recent accounts of black southerners in American Literature. It goes down in southern rap which well get to in the following paragraphs but in literary studies its always been the old guard: Hurston, Ellison, Wright, Gaines, and Alice Walker (I swear, if I read Everyday Use in one more class Id quit life).Long Divisionbasically told me 'sit down and shut the hell up. Here it is. Heres what you wanted.'
Regina Bradley,author ofOutkasted Conversations

"As if anything could bebeyondwhat Laymon has done for race, temporality, geography, and the Southas well as for the real and transhistorical black southernerthere is also whatLong Divisiondoes for questions of love, death, and dying. Across cities/Cities, there is the looming and encompassing quality of love that bends sexuality and familial boundaries."
Zandria Robinson,author ofThis Ain't ChicagoandChocolate Cities

"Long Divisionis one of those books that I picked up and just couldnt stop reading ... powerful, a classic American novel."
Jeff Chang, author of Who We Be: A Cultural History of Race in Post-Civil Rights AmericaandWe Gon' Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation

Laymon is a brilliant young writer...this is a book that sings in the heart but challenges readers to take careful consideration of the power of memory. Like the best of Hurston, Ellison, or Bambara, Laymons craft flows on frequencies that both honor and extend the traditions those writers established.
William Henry Lewis,author ofI Got Somebody in Staunton

The racial/ethical awareness is as complex as Coetzees, and Laymon is just as good a writer. Laymon takes some real risks. I love the interplay of spirituality and sexuality. Nothing sounds forced, pandering or trendy. City, the husky citizen of the imagination, feels totally singular and totally representative. Thats tough to pull off.
Tim Strode, author ofEthics of Exile

Author Bio

Born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi, Kiese Laymon is theOttilie Schillig Professor in English and Creative Writing at the University of Mississippi andauthor of the novelLong Division, the memoirHeavy, and the essay collection How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America. He was recently named a 2022MacArthur Fellow.