Long Division

"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" "Laymon writes with humor and clarity about what it means to come of age, to be black in the south, to survive a natural disaster, to become an online celebrity, to love for ever.... a triumphant piece of metafiction." -The Guardian "A story of bone-deep love, enduring racism, a missing girl, the Holy Ghost, loss, sexuality, family (chosen and blood), sacrifice, hope, horror, tenderness, a talking cat, staggering grief, and ridiculous amounts of humor." -Los Angeles Review of Books "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 "Heavy memoirist Kiese Laymon returns, this time with a fiercely creative novel combining time travel with institutionalized racism. The resulting saga winds from the 1980s to the 1960s and beyond, weaving a fractured but fascinating path through Black America." -Elle "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 novel unforgettable." -Melissa Harris-Perry, MSNBC "Funny, astute and searching.... The author's satirical instincts are excellent." -Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal "With Long 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 Division fittingly 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 Division takes 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 n...