Join us at our Fox Point store as we welcome Jamel Brinkley and his extraordinary debut story collection A LUCKY MAN (Graywolf Press). After the reading, Brinkley will be in conversation with Providence-based writer Sarah Frye, followed by a Q&A and book signing!

About the book:

FINALIST FOR THE 2018 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN FICTION
and WINNER OF THE 2018 ERNEST J. GAINES AWARD FOR LITERARY EXCELLENCE

"A Lucky Man is just one of those collections that takes your breath away...Every line is pitch perfect. Jamel Brinkley is a writer of extraordinary talent." —Daniel Alarcón, author of The King is Always Above the People

In nine powerful stories set in Brooklyn and the South Bronx, A Lucky Man announces the arrival of a significant new voice in fiction. Jamel Brinkley, with incisive and nuanced prose, explores the charged, complex ties between men whose mistakes threaten their relationships with friends, lovers, and family members.

An imaginative young boy from the Bronx goes swimming with his day camp group at a backyard pool in the suburbs, and faces the effects of power and privilege in ways he can barely grasp. A teen intent on proving himself a man at the all-night revel of J’ouvert is preoccupied by watching out for his impressionable younger brother. A pair of college boys on the prowl follow two girls home from a party and have to own the uncomfortable truth of their desires. And at a capoeira conference, two brothers grapple with how to tell the story of their family, caught in the dance of their painful, fractured history.

A striking and indelible debut, A Lucky Man reflects the tenderness and vulnerability of black men and boys whose hopes sometimes betray them, especially in a world shaped by race, gender, and class—where luck may be the greatest fiction of all.

About Jamel Brinkley:

Jamel Brinkley is the author of A Lucky Man: Stories, a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction, the Story Prize, the John Leonard Prize, and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, and winner of the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. His writing has appeared in The Best American Short Stories 2018, Ploughshares, Gulf Coast, The Threepenny Review, Glimmer Train, American Short Fiction, A Public Space, and Tin House, among other places, and is forthcoming in The Best American Short Stories 2019. He has received support from Kimbilio Fiction, the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, the Tin House Summer Workshop, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and the Lannan Foundation. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he was also the 2016-17 Carol Houck Smith Fiction Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. He is currently a 2018-20 Wallace Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University.

About Sarah Frye:

Sarah Frye is a Providence-based writer. She has a MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is currently at work on a novel.