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Welcome to Braggsville
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Welcome to Braggsville
Unavailable
Welcome to Braggsville
Audiobook12 hours

Welcome to Braggsville

Written by T Geronimo Johnson

Narrated by MacLeod Andrews

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

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About this audiobook

‘The most dazzling, most unsettling, most oh-my-God-listen-up novel you’ll read this year’ The Washington Post

A dark and socially provocative Southern-fried comedy about four UC Berkeley students who stage a dramatic protest during a Civil War reenactment – a fierce, funny, tragic work from a bold new writer

LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION 2015
LONGLISTED FOR THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE IN FICTION 2015

Born and raised in the heart of old Dixie, D’aron Davenport is a small-town fish floundering in the depths of a large, hyper-liberal pond of UC Berkeley. Everything changes in his American History class, when D’aron lets slip that his hometown hosts an annual Civil War re-enactment. His announcement is met with righteous indignation, and inspires a ‘performative intervention’. Armed with youthful self-importance, makeshift slave costumes, righteous zeal and their own misguided ideas about the South, D’aron and his three idiosyncratic best friends descend on Braggsville. Their journey through backwoods churches, backroom politics, Waffle Houses and drunken family barbecues is uproarious to start, but will have devastating consequences.

A literary coming-of-age novel for a new generation, written with keen wit, tremendous social insight and a unique, generous heart, Welcome to Braggsville reminds us of the promise and perils of youthful exuberance, while painting an indelible portrait of contemporary America.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateFeb 26, 2015
ISBN9780008115258
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Welcome to Braggsville
Author

T Geronimo Johnson

Born and raised in New Orleans, T. Geronimo Johnson received his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and his M.A. from UC Berkeley. Welcome to Braggsville was longlisted for the National Book Award, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence, named one of the 10 books all Georgians should read by the Georgia Center for the Book, and won the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. His first novel, Hold it ‘til it Hurts, was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. He lives in Berkeley, CA.

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Reviews for Welcome to Braggsville

Rating: 3.4177215189873418 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

79 ratings13 reviews

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  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I just can't with the lack of quotations. I get it - you're trying to be literary - but for the love of god please use quotations! A thought-provoking book becomes overly-laborious. Still gets three stars because of the exploration of racism, extreme politics, and Southern "charm".
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    (Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)At first I had a hard time understanding why T. Geronimo Johnson's recent second novel, Welcome to Braggsville, ended up as a surprise nominee this year for the prestigious National Book Award; I mean, sure, it's written in this showy language deliberately designed to call attention to itself, which is like catnip to academic award committees, but at its heart it's not much more than a genteel coming-of-age novel, about a nice kid from a small Georgia town who ends up going to college in Berkeley and befriending a group of politically correct nerds, who all humorously decide one day to road-trip to our hero's hometown and stage a protest when they find out that the town still holds a Civil War re-enactment every year. Ah, but then I got about halfway through and realized why it's gotten so much attention -- because their humorous protest goes horribly wrong, sparking a riot among the thousands of proud Southerners in attendance, and in the melee one of the kids doing the protesting (who at the time was being fake-lynched from a tree using a stage harness from the college's theater department) ends up actually getting choked to death, never becoming clear in the chaos whether it was the fault of the rioters or whether the undergraduate protesters simply set up the harness wrong. This turns the entire thing into a Ferguson-style national flashpoint for an angry confrontation about race; and it's this bigger, more sweeping scope that has garnered the book so much attention. Now, that said, if you don't like novels by MFA holders who want to remind you on every page that they hold an MFA, you need to steer far clear of this particular book -- Johnson has never met a sentence he couldn't double in length and complexity, turning essentially a 150-page Young Adult novel into a 375-page academic darling -- although if you do like such books, there's a lot to love in this one, a novel solidly grounded in concrete character examination but that holds several plot twists to keep things interesting. A book best treated as a genre novel, only the genre being "Books for NPR Fans," your enjoyment of the former will directly relate to your enjoyment of the latter, and this should be kept in mind when deciding whether to pick up a copy yourself.Out of 10: 8.3, or 9.3 for NPR fans
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Meh.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    3 students meet at UCB. All outcasts of some sort. one is a young white man from the south and they decide to re-enact the civil war in his home town with disastrous effects. Seemed pushed, although interesting
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I’m bothered by how low the aggregate Goodreads score is on this one. I think it’s because it’s scorched earth satire (think Spike Lee’s Bamboozled or Paul Beatty’s The Sellout). I thought it was a balancing act that couldn’t last, but it managed to, with a wobble or two, all the way to the end. I’d love to see it made into a film.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    The concept is great, four college friends decide to return to Georgia to stage an intervention in a Civil War reenactment. Lots to think about while reading. Racism is rampant and Johnson has created a multi layered story that should have resonated better with me than it did. I had trouble deciding who was doing the talking and I had to reread and reread pages to understand.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This novel is a social satire rooted in current events related to racism and culture wars.  The protagonist of the story is D'aron, a young white man from a rural Georgia community who escapes to study at University of California, Berkeley.  Overwhelmed by the culture shock of "Berzerkeley,"  D'aron eventually finds solace in the company of three other misfits: Louis, a Malaysian student and comic; Charlie, a large black man from Chicago who looks like a football player but is actually preppy; and Candice, a white woman from Iowa who claims to be part Native American. When D'aron lets slip in class that his hometown stages an annual Civil War reenactment, the four come up with a plan a "performative intervention" by staging the lynching of a slave and filming interviews with the townspeople responding to the intervention.  I shan't spoil the novel, but things go horribly wrong.  Johnson is an equal-opportunity parodist, satirizing both the "backwards" white people of rural Georgia and their defense of their heritage, but also mocking the ways that academia wallows in theory that is disconnected from the reality of lived lives.  What keeps the book from being merely a big scolding is that its four main characters are well-developed, believable, and interesting people.  The latter part of the book after "the incident" is less interesting than the beginning as it gets bogged down in navel-gazing over what happened. Still it's an interesting story and commentary on contemporary society.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A kid from the Deep South goes off to attend Berkeley, where he happens to mention to some of his friends the annual Civil War re-enactment that takes place in his home town. The friends are appalled, and one of them comes up with the idea of showing up at the event and staging a "performative intervention": a re-enactment of the lynching of an escaped slave, intended as a form of protest. This... does not go well.This is a book I find myself with hard-to-pin-down mixed feelings about. At various points during the novel, I found myself thinking that the social commentary was a little too obvious, or a little too hard to interpret clearly, or nicely nuanced in a way that provides a lot to chew on but very few pat answers. (I suppose it's entirely possible that it is, in fact, all three.) I also thought the was writing sometimes clever and evocative, but sometimes too clever, too obscure, too overdone. In the end, I don't know if I enjoyed reading it (in whatever sense "enjoyed" is even the appropriate word for a story like this), or that I was entirely satisfied with it. But I do feel glad to have read it, I think.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Welcome to Braggsville by T. Geronimo Johnson is a highly recommended novel that faces down some stereotypes and assumptions with amazing wit and insight.

    D'aron Little May Davenport has left his hometown of Braggsville, Georgia, to attend college as far away from Georgia as he can get - the University of California, Berkeley. He and Louis Chang, his roommate and an aspiring comedian, meet Candice, an Iowan, and Charlie, a black prep school student at a dot party where the four are accused of being insensitive. Soon they become close friends and dub themselves the "4 Little Indians."

    The four friends take a class called "American History X, Y, and Z: Alternative Perspectives," which spurs them on to make their first political statement of outrage, which fails miserably. When D'aron mentions that Braggsville has a Civil War re-enactment the group decides to go to Georgia and stage a protest that is more a performance piece than based on any true social outrage. The performance goes terribly wrong and suddenly the students and the town are confronting some racial and social realities, as well as other ideological positions that they never anticipated.

    Johnson opens the novel with a glossary of terms the students will be using, which should clue you in that this is mainly a humorous novel, even while it brings some serious topics to light. There are a lot of preconceptions of many makes and ideologies, all presented with keen insight and satire. Johnson presents real historical social situations and makes connections between them, while shifting from comedy to tragedy. The main exploration is of racism in the South and the tension that still exists.

    This is a well written novel. I'll admit feeling a bit of distance from the characters at the beginning, as they seemed to me to be so very young and naive. As the novel progressed, I appreciated Johnson's skill much more because of the way he allows his characters to grow amidst all the contradictory elements we see around us in contemporary America.


    Disclosure: My Kindle edition was courtesy of HarperCollins for review purposes.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Damn was I relieved to read the Goodreads reviews of Welcome to Braggsville and discover that reasonably intelligent people found this as hard to read as I did. I received this book in the Book Riot Best of 2015 Box but it was already on my to-read list so I can't even blame Book Riot for it. It starts out strong - the reader is dropped in the middle of a group of people at a California University, all of whom feel like they don't fit in, who come together and form their own little band of misfits. But then there are all these weird random chapters where words are just repeated over and over again, or you get a ton of details about something that doesn’t feel important (and inevitably isn't important), or chapters that are stream of consciousness with numerous characters and it's never clear whose thoughts they are. These chapters are supposed to be playful or cutting edge or something, I assume, but for this reader they're just distracting. They did not add plot points and they seemed overall unnecessary.Just as I was about to give up on this book, all of a sudden this . . . thing happened. I don't want to say what it is because it's an enormous plot point to give away but essentially this book that was about these kids who wouldn't normally mix, you know, mixing, was about . . . something else entirely. This was almost halfway into the book! It felt manipulative. I wondered why the hell the author had bothered with all these pages about other things when the story was way over there, as it turns out, but, in the end, it also worked on me. I was back on board.And then it happened all over again. These interesting and complicated conversations on race and . . . other things, took a back-burner to weirdo chapters that served no purpose.If I was rating Welcome to Braggsville chapter by chapter there'd be a hell of a lot of 5-star chapters and plenty of 1-star chapters. This was one of those books that I really, really wanted to love much more than I did. In the end, finishing it was a chore and I don't know that I'd recommend it to anyone
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    D'aron Davenport leaves his backwoods area of Georgia that he never feels he fits in with, to join a diverse group of friends at Berkeley. Berkeley inspires the friends to an act of "performative intervention" at a Civil War reenactment in Braggsville. The book seems to satirize everything until things get real, real quick, making it important to focus on one thing more than others. On almost every page, it seemed like there was some sort of in-joke that I needed to be a part of D'aron's group to understand, or at least a nineteen year old in college and maybe even the right college. Reading sentences over and over again and still not understanding might be my problem, but I don't think it will leave many readers connected to this book as much as they could be. Less code words! I fear too many puzzles leave only Johnson with knowing the entire meaning of his words and that isn't what anyone wants. I feel like a failure knowing I didn't understand this as much as possible, but I did enjoy what I did understand. If you like this one, try Kiese Laymon's 'Long Division'.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I am not even sure what to say about this book. There were stretches of this book that were brilliant and incisive, and that combined with the breakneck speed of the prose made me hold my breath as I read. Literally, I found myself not breathing as the scenes tumbled forward like cars with defective brakes. And the insight?! Johnson is funny, and clear-eyed, and sees both the South and the ivory tower with equal amounts of disappointment and derision and love. But, Johnson also beats several horses to bloody death; some of the jokes (about academic pretension particularly) go from guffaw-inducing to eye roll-inducing. Johnson's voice is mostly unique (there is a lot of Junot Diaz in there, but in the end the voice is distinct) and his story is consistently thought-provoking. This is a book people should read, and also one that I think many will enjoy. I absolutely had fun reading this book. I am giving it to my 16 year old (the product of elite private schools and a life lived in Georgia) and can't wait to see what discussion it incites.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Although born and raised in New Orleans there is more Ferlinghetti than Faulkner in T. Geronimo Johnson’s satirical novel, Welcome to Braggsville. Warning, this is not a book for readers who are used to being spoon-fed content and answers. There is plenty of content to be had but you will need to find the answers on your own.The pace and style of the story changes almost by the minute, frenetic as a beat poet one page, measured and reflective the next. Much of it is reminiscent of all-night conversations I had in college, wandering and disjointed in places but oh-so relevant and self-assured. But that stands to reason, seeing as the main characters are students at UC Berkeley. You don’t get any more relevant and self-assured than a Cal student. Trust me on this.Here’s the story: Four Cal students from various walks of life decide that, for a history class project, they will stage a reenactment. These self-titled ‘four little Indians’ would go to Braggsville, Georgia, a town that annually hosts a Civil War reenactment, and stage their own reenactment of a lynching. Needless to say, things don’t go as expected and their plans go awry faster than you can say ‘media shitstorm’.To me, this is less a story than a set-up for a discussion in my daughter’s multi-cultural psychology class. Every action by every participant is questioned. Did you think this was a good idea? Do you think it was funny? Are you trying to make us look bad? More than anything, the book is a mirror that reflects the absurdity in all of us. Left-leaning liberal college students fare no better than the white Braggsville residents or the black residents in The Gully. There is more that I want to say about this book but I think it will best be offered in the context of a discussion. Every reader will form his or her own conclusions and I look forward to finding out if mine sound as whacky to others as they do to me.FYI: On a 5-point scale I assign stars based on my assessment of what the book needs in the way of improvements:•5 Stars – Nothing at all. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.•4 Stars – It could stand for a few tweaks here and there but it’s pretty good as it is.•3 Stars – A solid C grade. Some serious rewriting would be needed in order for this book to be considered great or memorable.•2 Stars – This book needs a lot of work. A good start would be to change the plot, the character development, the writing style and the ending. •1 Star - The only thing that would improve this book is a good bonfire.