Join us outdoors at the new Fox Point cocktail bar Glou to celebrate the release of James Hannaham’s newest novel, DIDN’T NOBODY GIVE A SHIT WHAT HAPPENED TO CARLOTTA. Hannaham will read excerpts from his novel, then be joined in conversation by fellow author Katie Williams.
ABOUT DIDN’T NOBODY GIVE A SHIT WHAT HAPPENED TO CARLOTTA
The raucous, irreverent, and "utterly brilliant" (Ayad Akhtar, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of HOMELAND ELEGIES) story of a trans woman's reentry into life on the outside after more than twenty years in prison, over one consequential Fourth of July weekend--from the author of the PEN/Faulkner Award winner DELICIOUS FOODS.
Carlotta Mercedes has been misunderstood her entire life. When she was pulled into a robbery gone wrong, she still went by the name she'd grown up with in Fort Greene, Brooklyn--before it gentrified. But not long after her conviction, she took the name Carlotta and began to live as a woman, an embrace of selfhood that prison authorities rejected, keeping Carlotta trapped in an all-male cell block, abused by both inmates and guards, and often placed in solitary.
In her fifth appearance before the parole board, Carlotta is at last granted conditional freedom and returns to a much-changed New York City. Over a whirlwind Fourth of July weekend, she struggles to reconcile with the son she left behind, to reunite with a family reluctant to accept her true identity, and to avoid any minor parole infraction that might get her consigned back to lockup.
Written with the same astonishing verve of DELICIOUS FOODS, which dazzled critics and readers alike, DIDN’T NOBODY GIVE A SHIT WHAT HAPPENED TO CARLOTTA sweeps the reader through seemingly every street of Brooklyn, much as Joyce's ULYSSES does through Dublin. The novel sings with brio and ambition, delivering a fantastically entertaining read and a cast of unforgettable characters even as it challenges us to confront the glaring injustices of a prison system that continues to punish people long after their time has been served.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
JAMES HANNAHAM is the author of the novels GOD SAYS NO a Stonewall Book Award finalist, and DELICIOUS FOODS, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and was a Los Angeles Times Book Prize and Dayton Literary Peace Prize finalist as well as a New York Times Notable Book. He lives in Brooklyn, where he teaches at the Pratt Institute.
KATIE WILLIAMS is the author of the novel Tell the Machine Goodnight and the young adult novels Absent and The Space Between Trees. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Best American Fantasy, American Short Fiction, and elsewhere. Katie is an assistant professor in fiction writing at Emerson College in Boston. Her next novel, My Murder, about a support group for cloned murder victims, will be out from Riverhead/Penguin in summer 2023.