How Are You Going to Save Yourself by J.M. Holmes

“As up-to-the-minute as a Kendrick Lamar track and as ruefully steeped in eternal truths as a Gogol tale, these stories mark the debut of an assured young talent.

Holmes is an explosive and timely new voice whose fiction has never been more vital and necessary. At times funny, often uncomfortable, and sometimes disturbing, these stories fearlessly address issues of race, sex, drugs, class, and family.

Holmes’s How Are You Going to Save Yourself illuminates in breathtaking detail an entire world-one that has been underrepresented in American fiction. In the tradition of Junot Díaz’s Drown and Sherman Alexie’s The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, J. As Gio recounts their grappling with the complexity of their family histories, with the newfound power of sex and drugs, and with the occasional violence of their desires, he proves himself an unforgettable narrator-beautifully flawed and unstintingly honest. Ultimately they are trying not to fail themselves and the people they love.With potent immediacy and bracing candor, this powerful and provocative debut follows a decade in the lives of Dub, Rolls, Rye, and Gio, four young friends coming of age in the postindustrial enclave of Pawtucket, Rhode Island, and struggling to liberate themselves from the legacies left to them as black men in America. They are confronted with society's expectations of them, family pressures, and ultimately the way they see themselves - sometimes conforming, sometimes challenging the stereotypes. Once bound together by location and shared experience, their bonds fade and change as their adult lives begin to take different shapes. It explores the lives of four friends from the city of Pawtucket: Rydell, Lazarus, Rakim, and Giovanni, or more affectionately Rye, Dub, Rolls, and G. a compassionate and powerful exploration of how race, friendship and sex intersect and the real-world consequences of stereotypes.' - Independent Summer Readsīoth humorous and heart-breaking, How Are You Going To Save Yourself is a timely debut about sex, race, family and friendship for fans of Junot Diaz and Ta-Nehisi Coates. Justice Holmes Old Lines in New Black and White Enola Holmes and the Black Barouche Winters Reckoning Carved in Ebony How Are You Going to. Hilarious and compelling, Holmes offers up a mirror to contemporary society. 'A powerful rendering of contemporary masculinity in America.' TLS

How Are You Going to Save Yourself by J.M. Holmes