Hell of a Book
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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JD Jackson
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Ronald Peet
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By:
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Jason Mott
About this listen
***2021 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER***
***THE NATIONAL BESTSELLER***
Winner of the 2021 Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction, Joyce Carol Oates Literary Prize Finalist, 2022 Chautauqua Prize Finalist, Willie Morris Award for Southern Writing Shortlist, and the 2021 Aspen Words Literary Prize shortlist
A Read With Jenna Today Show Book Club Pick!
An Ebony Magazine Publishing Book Club Pick!
One of Washington Post's 50 Notable Works of Fiction | One of Philadelphia Inquirer's Best Books of 2021 | One of Shelf Awareness's Top Ten Fiction Titles of the Year | One of TIME Magazine’s 100 Must-Read Books | One of NPR.org's "Books We Love" | EW’s "Guide to the Biggest and Buzziest Books of 2021" | One of the New York Public Library's Best Books for Adults | San Diego Union Tribune—My Favorite Things from 2021 | Writer's Bone's Best Books of 2021 | Atlanta Journal Constitution—Top 10 Southern Books of the Year | One of the Guardian's (UK) Best Ten 21st Century Comic Novels | One of Entertainment Weekly's 15 Books You Need to Read This June | On Entertainment Weekly's "Must List" | One of the New York Post's Best Summer Reading books | One of GMA's 27 Books for June | One of USA Today's 5 Books Not to Miss | One of Fortune's 21 Most Anticipated Books Coming Out in the Second Half of 2021 | One of The Root's PageTurners: It’s Getting Hot in Here | One of Real Simple's Best New Books to Read in 2021
An astounding work of fiction from New York Times bestselling author Jason Mott, always deeply honest, at times electrically funny, that goes to the heart of racism, police violence, and the hidden costs exacted upon Black Americans and America as a whole
In Jason Mott’s Hell of a Book, a Black author sets out on a cross-country publicity tour to promote his bestselling novel. That storyline drives Hell of a Book and is the scaffolding of something much larger and more urgent: Mott’s novel also tells the story of Soot, a young Black boy living in a rural town in the recent past, and The Kid, a possibly imaginary child who appears to the author on his tour.
As these characters’ stories build and converge, they astonish. For while this heartbreaking and magical book entertains and is at once about family, love of parents and children, art and money, it’s also about the nation’s reckoning with a tragic police shooting playing over and over again on the news. And with what it can mean to be Black in America.
Who has been killed? Who is The Kid? Will the author finish his book tour, and what kind of world will he leave behind? Unforgettably told, with characters who burn into your mind and an electrifying plot ideal for book club discussion, Hell of a Book is the novel Mott has been writing in his head for the last ten years. And in its final twists, it truly becomes its title.
©2021 Jason Mott (P)2021 Penguin AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
Aspen Words Literary Prize, 2021
Carnegie Medal, 2022
Joyce Carol Oates Prize, 2021
National Book Award, 2021
Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction, 2021
“Hell of a Book more than lives up to its title. Playful, searching, raw, and necessary, this writing, this voice, this novel twisted me up and turned me inside out, dazzled me, surprised me and moved me.” (Charles Yu, author of the National Book Award winner Interior Chinatown)
“What a powerful, timely, and provocative novel. Jason's ability to take on deeply important themes with both poignancy and humor makes for an extraordinary emotional rollercoaster of a read, and I tore through this profoundly moving novel in a day but have been thinking about it ever since. Thank you, Jason Mott, for sharing this story with the world.” (Abi Daré, New York Times best-selling author of The Girl with the Louding Voice)
“It is a story of love and family. It is powerful...poignant and beautiful and what makes me so excited is I cannot wait to be part of these conversations.... It’s a story of race, family, love, and justice. It’s original and Jason Mott is a talent.” (Jenna Bush Hager, “Read with Jenna”)
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Jo Carter never thought she'd return to Clear Springs, Minnesota. But when the former journalist receives a cryptic note about the disappearance of her friend Sam twenty years before, she's compelled to find out what really happened. During her investigation, she learns another high school friend has died in a mysterious accident. Nothing is as it seems, and Jo must probe Clear Springs' darkest corners and her own painful and unreliable memories to discover the truth - and save herself from the killer who could still be on the hunt.
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Home is not always where the heart is...
- By shelley on 02-15-20
By: J.H. Moncrieff
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The City We Became
- By: N. K. Jemisin
- Narrated by: Robin Miles
- Length: 16 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In Manhattan, a young grad student gets off the train and realizes he doesn't remember who he is, where he's from, or even his own name. But he can sense the beating heart of the city, see its history, and feel its power. In the Bronx, a Lenape gallery director discovers strange graffiti scattered throughout the city, so beautiful and powerful it's as if the paint is literally calling to her. In Brooklyn, a politician and mother finds she can hear the songs of her city, pulsing to the beat of her Louboutin heels.
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I don't understand the hype
- By Joe on 04-13-20
By: N. K. Jemisin
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Black Girls Must Die Exhausted
- A Novel (Black Girls Must Die Exhausted, Book 1)
- By: Jayne Allen
- Narrated by: Marcella Cox
- Length: 9 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Tabitha Walker is a black woman with a plan to "have it all." At 33 years old, the checklist for the life of her dreams is well underway. Education? Check. Good job? Check. Down payment for a nice house? Check. Dating marriage material? Check, check, and check. With a coveted position as a local news reporter, a "paper-perfect" boyfriend, and even a standing Saturday morning appointment with a reliable hairstylist, everything seems to be falling into place. Then Tabby receives an unexpected diagnosis, jeopardizing the keystone she took for granted: having children.
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Not What I Expected
- By R. Cartwright on 10-16-21
By: Jayne Allen
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The Ghost Tracks
- By: Celso Hurtado
- Narrated by: Ivan Jasso
- Length: 9 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Erasmo Cruz is from the wrong side of the tracks. His dad was a junkie who overdosed. His mom chose to run off rather than raise him. His only passion is the supernatural, and his only family is his grandmother, whose aches and pains, he soon learns, aren’t just from old age but from cancer. Desperate to help his grandmother pay for treatment, Erasmo sets up shop as a paranormal investigator.
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A ghost story with a heart
- By Victor @ theAudiobookBlog dot com on 01-07-22
By: Celso Hurtado
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Lost and Found
- By: Orson Scott Card
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 9 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
That's the question that has haunted 14-year-old Ezekiel Blast all his life. But he's not a thief, he just has a talent for finding things. Not a superpower - a micropower. Because what good is finding lost bicycles and hair scrunchies, especially when you return them to their owners and everyone thinks you must have stolen them in the first place? If only there were some way to use Ezekiel's micropower for good, to turn a curse into a blessing. His friend Beth thinks there must be, and so does a police detective investigating the disappearance of a little girl.
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Good book from a great Author
- By Jim on 03-30-21
By: Orson Scott Card
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Loving Day
- By: Mat Johnson
- Narrated by: J. D. Jackson
- Length: 12 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
On his first night in his new home, Warren spies two figures in the grass outside; when he screws up the nerve to confront them, they disappear. The next day he encounters ghosts of a different kind: In the face of the teenage girl he meets at a comics convention, he sees the mingled features of his white father and his black mother, both now dead. The girl is his daughter, and she thinks she's white.
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Teen lit with heavy erotic imagery
- By Itinerant T on 08-26-15
By: Mat Johnson
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Before You Knew My Name
- A Novel
- By: Jacqueline Bublitz
- Narrated by: Penelope Rawlins
- Length: 10 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
When she arrived in New York on her eighteenth birthday carrying nothing but $600 cash and a stolen camera, Alice Lee was looking for a fresh start. Now, just one month later, she is the city’s latest Jane Doe. She may be dead but that doesn’t mean her story is over. Meanwhile, Ruby Jones is also trying to reinvent herself. After travelling halfway around the world, she’s lonelier than ever in the Big Apple. Until she stumbles upon a woman’s body by the Hudson River, and suddenly finds herself unbreakably tied to the unknown dead woman.
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Excellent
- By cristina on 11-11-22
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Double Threat
- By: F. Paul Wilson
- Narrated by: Michael Crouch, Stephanie Willing, Rupert Degas
- Length: 10 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In the southwestern desert, a mysterious cult prays for the return of the Visitors. Only one creature can derail that grand and glorious event: An evil entity, known as the Duad, can keep the Visitors from arriving and prevent the transfiguration to come. Daley, who lives nearby, has a far more serious problem: an alien consciousness that has taken up residence in her head.
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So ready to see what's ahead next!
- By Stacy on 10-09-21
By: F. Paul Wilson
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Permanent Midnight
- A Memoir (20th Anniversary Edition)
- By: Jerry Stahl, Nic Sheff - foreword
- Narrated by: Jerry Stahl, Scott Merriman
- Length: 11 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
A searing confessional infused with the darkest humor, Permanent Midnight chronicles the opiated abyss of a Hollywood screenwriter and his formidable climb into sobriety. Made into a major motion picture starring Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson, Permanent Midnight is revered by critics and an ever-growing cult of devoted fans as one of the most compelling contemporary memoirs.
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Point deduction for the recording
- By Amazon Customer on 11-21-20
By: Jerry Stahl, and others
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Southern Storms
- By: Brittainy C. Cherry
- Narrated by: Nikki Thomas, Paul Stefano
- Length: 8 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
After leaving the city life behind to escape my loveless marriage, I moved to small-town Havenbarrow for a fresh start. What I didn’t expect was to find myself drawn to the town’s black sheep. They called him troubled, cold, a man with a dark past. What everyone seemed to miss about Jax was the splashes of light in his eyes, the random acts of kindness he performed when no one was watching, and the way he made me smile and laugh.
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Hold on to your credit
- By RachNYC on 11-03-22
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If You See Her
- By: Ania Ahlborn
- Narrated by: Brian Holden
- Length: 10 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The house on Old Mill Road has stood in an open field for longer than Jesse Wells has been alive, its crooked windows and jutting turret tormenting the kids of Warsaw, Michigan the way only a haunted house knows how. Everyone imagines that something terrible lurks within the house’s abandoned rooms - especially Jesse and his two closest friends, Casey and Reed. But when Reed chooses the house as a backdrop for his own suicide, childhood ghost stories are transformed into a nightmare that sends Jesse into a downward spiral of grief.
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DNF. Quit halfway through. A slog.
- By Smart, AZ on 07-10-22
By: Ania Ahlborn
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Missing Parts
- By: Lucinda Berry
- Narrated by: Abby Craden
- Length: 6 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Growing up abandoned by her father and raised by a single mother, Celeste was determined to create the perfect family - but even perfect families have secrets. Her days are filled with a rewarding career, a devoted husband, and her four-year-old daughter. Celeste is the only one who knows the precarious house of cards her family is built upon - until the day her daughter falls critically ill. Then her world quickly spirals out of control, her secret threatening to destroy her marriage, family, reputation, and sanity.
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SPOILER ALERT. Sigh...
- By Kelly on 10-08-20
By: Lucinda Berry
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The Vanished Series, Books 1-3
- By: B. B. Griffith
- Narrated by: Ryan Jordan McCarthy, Paul L. Coffey, Kirsten Leigh, and others
- Length: 24 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
When the crows gather over a remote Navajo Reservation in the deep Southwest, it is a sign that the thin veil that separates our world from the one beyond is about to open. Without a barrier between life and death, things pass between both worlds. Some of them are good. Most of them are not.
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Going to slog through to the end
- By KatieReviewsStuff on 04-28-21
By: B. B. Griffith
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Picture Us in the Light
- By: Kelly Loy Gilbert
- Narrated by: James Chen
- Length: 11 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
When Danny discovers a taped-up box in his father's closet filled with old letters and a file on a powerful Silicon Valley family, he realizes there's much more to his family's past than he ever imagined. Danny has been an artist for as long as he can remember, and it seems his path is set, with a scholarship to RISD and his family's blessing to pursue the career he's always dreamed of. Still, contemplating a future without his best friend, Harry Wong, by his side makes Danny feel a panic he can barely put into words.
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A poignant, touching novel for the Asian American millennial
- By Jenny on 06-30-23
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Reprieve
- A Novel
- By: James Han Mattson
- Narrated by: JD Jackson
- Length: 12 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
On April 27, 1997, four contestants make it to the final cell of the Quigley House, a full-contact haunted escape room in Lincoln, Nebraska, made famous for its monstrosities, booby-traps, and ghoulishly costumed actors. If the group can endure these horrors without shouting the safe word, “reprieve,” they’ll win a substantial cash prize - a startling feat accomplished only by one other group in the house’s long history. But before they can complete the challenge, a man breaks into the cell and kills one of the contestants.
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creepy escape room story
- By Barbara S on 11-18-21
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The Wonder of All Things
- By: Jason Mott
- Narrated by: Julia Whelan
- Length: 8 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
On an ordinary day, at an air show like that in any small town across the country, a plane crashes into a crowd of spectators, killing and injuring dozens. But when the dust clears, a thirteen-year-old girl named Ava is found huddled beneath a pocket of rubble with her best friend, Wash. He is injured and bleeding, and when Ava places her hands over him, his wounds miraculously disappear. Ava has a unique gift: she can heal others of their physical ailments.
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Innocent love
- By Tina Boyd on 02-13-15
By: Jason Mott
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Paris, 1937. Andras Lévi, a Hungarian-Jewish architecture student, arrives from Budapest with a scholarship, a single suitcase, and a mysterious letter he has promised to deliver to C. Morgenstern on the rue de Sévigné. As he falls into a complicated relationship with the letter’s recipient, he becomes privy to a secret history that will alter the course of his own life. Meanwhile, as his elder brother takes up medical studies in Modena and their younger brother leaves school for the stage, Europe’s unfolding tragedy sends each of their lives into terrifying uncertainty.
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Gifty is a sixth-year PhD candidate in neuroscience at the Stanford University School of Medicine studying reward-seeking behavior in mice and the neural circuits of depression and addiction. Her brother, Nana, was a gifted high school athlete who died of a heroin overdose after an ankle injury left him hooked on OxyContin. Her suicidal mother is living in her bed. Gifty is determined to discover the scientific basis for the suffering she sees all around her.
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A community in the Piedmont of North Carolina rises in outrage as a county initiative draws students from the largely Black east side of town into predominantly White high schools on the west. For two students, Gee and Noelle, the integration sets off a chain of events that will tie their two families together in unexpected ways over the span of the next 20 years.
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Wonderful book!!
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What listeners say about Hell of a Book
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
- Kathleen Donndelinger
- 08-10-21
More than thought provoking
This book makes you feel. It helps in understanding the helplessness and depth of what is (still) happening today for black males. And the human psyche of everyone. Highly recommend.
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4 people found this helpful
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- StepByStep
- 07-10-22
The writing is so good!
The narration was stellar. The author is so crafty. He carries you into his hell so artfully, that you don't even know you're there, until you are. A really deep journey that too many have had to travel for centuries.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Joshua E
- 02-03-22
Touching Reality by Devolving the Surreal
What a special book. For what it seeks to do, does, and un-does, “Hell of a Book” is *important.*
Despite asserting itself as “fiction,” it simultaneously exists as autobiography and metabiography and self-criticism. From a swirl of contradictory, confusing, evolving narrative threads, an image emerges that transcends the material to connect us with a person who is real and representative, human and symbol. This connection is central to the effectiveness of the plot. Using tight, powerful prose, Mott compels us to accompany him down a personal rabbit hole, a whirlwind tale touring his first novel. What starts as a madcap adventure of excess and success changes gradually as he moves his readers out from under his skin and into his audience. The book deftly navigates multiple narratives, but progressively erodes the plot until we realize the story is the one that was always there, in the background, since before the book existed—one we might not have read if he hadn’t already told us we wouldn’t. It leans into the surreal, drawing us into unsuccessful efforts to sharpen blurred lines and comprehend the magical reality of its protagonists, until we are left holding only the stark truth of our actual shared reality. Only now we can see it for the surreal horror it is.
It is sublime and tragic, and at once, one of the most simple, compelling, and complex books I have ever read. I can’t recommend it strongly enough.
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- Mary
- 06-12-22
Well this was one hell of a book!
Jason Mott’s “Hell of a Book” is a novel about an author and his imaginary friend that go on a book tour. It’s almost mad-cap adventure with what happens to him on this book tour. This is one of the most creative novels I’ve read about being black in America.
“Hell of a Book” is a novel that confounds the normal parameters of storytelling. What starts out as a relatively straightforward tale about a Black author’s cross-country tour for his novel, also titled “Hell of a Book,” soon meanders into a broader meditation on mental illness, alcoholism, sex and painful grief. As soon as you think you know where the story is going, the lines between reality and imagination blur, thanks to an unnamed narrator who is unreliable and not entirely likable. It has more than its share of laugh out loud moments.
Recommended and a worthy, timely, entertaining while thought provoking winner of the 2021 National Book Award.
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- D. S. Petersen
- 05-31-22
Book of Love
Book of Love, loving self, loving others by the path one person took getting there. This is a book of Hope and we all share in the Hope we will get there!
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- Mike m
- 02-07-22
Slow start but worth finishing.
This is a good book that talks about being a black person in present day America. The story starts of with a boy and a man who imagines things and reality and imagination get interwoven for him. There is a short of mystery that unravels as one reads the book. It is a love story but not in the typical way, more on a metaphorical level. One thing that makes the book interesting is all of the little references the narrator uses: everything from Greek mythology to the illuminati at the Denver Air port. the references show off the authors intelligence but gives the book the lightheartedness that it needs.
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- Terrell Shroyer
- 01-26-23
Great Book
Highly recommend this touching book about the love of family and the reality of growing up Black and poor. Masterfully written and narration is excellent.
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- Rocky95
- 03-06-22
A Catcher In The Rye For Our Times and Beyond
It was a damn good book. My congratulations to this who selected it.
It started out with humor. Otherwise I might have put it aside. He has three or so girlfriends named Kelly. I kept having girlfriends of the dame name too. Anyone else? His portrayals of the publisher and publicist were hilarious.
It is a great success in portraying the impact of growing up while black, parenting while black; and adulting while black.
It is the Cathcer On the Rye of its TIme. Catcher took us into the mind of Holden. This took us into the mind of a Black Everyman, accused of proving that things aren’t so and for Blacks in America because after all, our hero has become a writer, a success. And not a basketball p[layer but a WRITER a man of letters.
He’s burst through all the stereotypes. He wears khakis, eventually coached into a sport jacket. Soot wears a hoodie, though. . Like Cathcer, it is a story of angst self doubt, failure, and depression.
In Cathcer it was teen aged angst. Here is it back angst. But, these are universal. We all have angst. We all have self-doubts. We all have a t the least moments of sadness. This would be a good book to add or replace Catcher on high school reading lists. like Catcher, which may have emerged and touched a nerve in a period of malaise this book is right for out time biggest societal debate.
In the book there is talk of a son writing to keep a mother alive after her death. I wrote a play about my mother after her death. Oh, excuse me. Sharon from the book would tell told me never to say play, USE THE TITLE. The title is The Pickpocket’s Daughter, opening here at The Studios of Key West May 18th, 2022.
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- Book Reader 76
- 04-29-22
Satisfying and contemplative
This is one of those books that is initially and instantly accessible, that draws you in with questions and leaves you wondering and musing about the plot and direction, but ultimately you understand it’s a mirror or multiple mirrors reflecting us and our reality. Beautifully written and read, funny at times, and tragic at others. This is the book you hope Audible or a friend brings to your attention. If you want a linear, predictable, typical story with an arc and a climax, etc. this is not it. And this book does not shy away from hard topics, but instead almost unexpectedly (sometimes comically) stumbles into them, then stops and sits with them.
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- d
- 05-20-22
Important
For me, a heartbreaking, intimate, intelligent look into what it must be like to be black. I hope I’ll never be the same for reading this book.
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