Sign-In
Cart
Man Gone Down
Paperback
General FictionLiterary Fiction
Publisher Price: $18.00
ISBN13: 9780802170293
Publisher: Grove Press, Black Cat
Published: Dec 7 2006
Pages: 448
Weight: 0.90
Height: 1.20 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.20
Language: English
Awards: International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award
Powerful and moving . . . [Thomas] knows how the odds are stacked in America.--Kaiama L. Glover, New York Times Book Review (cover review)
A beautifully written and devastating first novel, Man Gone Down is the story of a young Black father in a biracial marriage trying to claim a piece of the American Dream he has bargained on since youth
On the eve of his thirty-fifth birthday, the unnamed Black narrator of Man Gone Down finds himself broke, estranged from his white wife and three children, and living in the bedroom of a friend's six-year-old child. He has four days to come up with the money to keep the kids in school and make a down payment on an apartment for them in which to live. As we slip between his childhood in inner city Boston and present-day New York City, we learn of a life marked by abuse, abandonment, raging alcoholism, and the best and worst intentions of a supposedly integrated America. This is a story of the American Dream gone awry, about what it's like to feel preprogrammed to fail in life and the urge to escape that sentence.
Michael Thomas's writing recalls some of the great American masters, including Ralph Ellison, but his debut is wholly and distinctly an original. Man Gone Down is a dazzling addition to the literature of and about America today.
Also in
Literary Fiction
Elizabeth Spencer: Novels & Stories (Loa #344): The Voice at the Back Door / The Light in the Piazza / Knights and Dragons / Stories
Spencer, Elizabeth
Hardcover
James Fenimore Cooper: The Leatherstocking Tales Vol. 1 (Loa #26): The Pioneers / The Last of the Mohicans / The Prairie
Cooper, James Fenimore
Hardcover
The Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy, Volume I: American Tabloid, the Cold Six Thousand; Introduction by Thomas Mallon
Ellroy, James
Hardcover
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Other Stories (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Paperback
Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: Short Stories, Prose, and Diary Excerpts
Plath, Sylvia
Paperback
The Patrick Melrose Novels: Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother's Milk
St Aubyn, Edward
Paperback