Victor D. Lavalle

Victor D. Lavalle

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LaValle was raised in Flushing and Rosedale, Queens. He graduated from Cornell University with a degree in English and received his M.F.A. in Fiction from Columbia University. He has been a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He lives in Brooklyn and teaches writing at Columbia University.

The Ecstatic
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Format: Hardcover, 288pp.
ISBN: 0609610147
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Pub. Date: November 2002

The Ecstatic was selected for AALBC.com's March 2003 Reading List

Read and AALBC.com Review

Victor LaValle has already established himself as "one of the most eloquent voices of the approaching century" (Kirkus Reviews), a writer of darkly humorous tales full of haunting beauty, astonishing leaps of imagination, and language that "crackles and hums" (Chicago Tribune). The Ecstatic is LaValle's debut novel, a startling tale of love, horror, sex, insanity, faith, morbid obesity, and the modern American family.

Something is wrong with Anthony—our 318-pound hero—and it's getting worse. A monster has caught his uncle and his mother; now it wants Anthony. Mental illness has been transmitted through his family's blood. The three women in his life—his mother, younger sister, and grandmother—find him naked and disoriented in his off-campus college apartment and take him home to Queens, each determined to fix him in her own peculiar way. But his presence soon turns their house into a semi suburban asylum.

Sweet but wickedly sarcastic, smart and heartbreakingly vulnerable, Anthony narrates his family's surreal adventures through a world of grinning exploitation and fake cures, from storefront evangelists and neighborhood loan sharks to bogus beauty pageants and bootleg medical clinics. He corresponds with a dreadlocked Japanese militant, is haunted by a vicious pack of dogs, and tries to make his own horror movie, all in search of an answer to a question he doesn't dare ask. Written in the tradition of misfit picaresque from Journey to the End of the Night and Invisible Man to A Confederacy of Dunces and The World According to Garp, The Ecstatic is the revelatory story of a family trying to save themselves from a ravenous world and their own unraveling minds.

Slapboxing with Jesus
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Publisher: Knopf Alfred A
Date Published: October 1999
Format: Trade Paper

Winner of the PEN Open Book Award!

March 2000 AALBC.com Best Seller

"Twelve original and interconnected stories, Victor D. LaValle's astonishing, violent, and funny debut offers harrowing glimpses at the vulnerable lives of young people who struggle not only to come of age, but to survive the city streets."

"In "ancient history," two best friends graduating from high school fight to be the one to leave first for a better world; each one wants to be the fortunate son. In "pops," an African-American boy meets his father, a white cop from Connecticut, and tries not to care. And in "kids on Colden street" a boy is momentarily uplifted by the arrival of a younger sister only to discover that brutality leads only to brutality in the natural order of things."

Related Links

Lavalle's work is also included in:

Step into a World: A Global Anthology of the New Black Literature
edited by Kevin Powell
http://aalbc.com/authors/step_into_a_world.htm

Washington Post Article
From Fat To Phat: An Author's Happy Ending
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A1261-2002Dec2.html