Long Division: A Novel

Product 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 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).
Review
“Printed for the first time in the reversible format Laymon always wanted,
Long Division shines brighter than ever.”
—Esquire
"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 must-read.
Long Division centers 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. It’s 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 Laymon’s
Long Division echoes 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 Laymon’s elliptical, time-folding work of metafiction about Southern racism... is effectively two novels, both potent yet often funny character studies. In style and structure, Laymon’s novel is an inheritor to Black postmodern literature of the 1960s and '70s—Toni Morrison most famously but also Leon Forrest, Gayl Jones, and William Melvin Kelley. A sui generis.”
—
Kirkus
"Don't miss Kiese Laymon's
Long Division. One Mississippi town with two engaging stories in two very different decades. The sharp humor and deep humanity make this debut