Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America
    Unavailable
    How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America
    Unavailable
    How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America
    Ebook154 pages2 hours

    How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America

    By Kiese Laymon

    4.5/5

    ()

    Unavailable in your country

    Unavailable in your country

    About this ebook

    'I was stunned into stillness' Roxane Gay, author of Bad Feminist

    'I've had guns pulled on me by four people under Central Mississippi skies – once by a white undercover cop, once by a young brother trying to rob me for the left-overs of a weak work-study check, once by my mother and twice by myself. Not sure how or if I've helped many folks say yes to life, but I've definitely aided in a few folks dying slowly in America, all without the aid of a gun'

    Kiese Laymon grew up in Jackson, Mississippi. That was where he started to write and where he began to seek to create an honest account of living in the US, a country striving to declare itself multi-cultural, post-racial and mostly innocent. This is that account.

    Drawing on his own personal experiences, these essays are Laymon's attempt to deal with many issues occupying America today, from race, identity and writing to music, celebrity and violence. Through letters between his own disparate family members, pleas to performers whose voices will never be heard again, recollections of his own failure to become a world-famous emcee, analysis of the growing culture of fear in the media and detailed accounts of his clashes with an education system that has both advanced and failed the generation he grew up in, Laymon gets closer not only to the truth behind himself, but to the promises behind the promised land.

    Searing and passionate, this timely collection of essays introduces a vibrant new voice in US literature and offers a unique insight into the forces that are tearing America apart today.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury Publishing
    Release dateMar 10, 2016
    ISBN9781408868188
    Unavailable
    How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America
    Author

    Kiese Laymon

    Kiese Laymon is a Black southern writer from Jackson, Mississippi. He is the author of the genre-bending novel Long Division, the essay collection How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others, and the bestselling Heavy: An American Memoir, which won the 2019 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction and the 2018 Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose. It was also chosen as one of the 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years by The New York Times. The audiobook, read by the author, was named the Audible 2018 Audiobook of the Year. He is the founder of the Catherine Coleman Literary Arts and Justice Initiative, a program aimed at getting Mississippi kids and their parents more comfortable with reading, writing, revising, and sharing.

    Read more from Kiese Laymon

    Related to How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Cherie Jones

      Jan 7, 2021

      Cherie Jones
      3 min read

    • Article

      Book Of The Month

      May 28, 2021

      ERICA GILLINGHAM is a queer poet, writer and bookseller with a PhD in lesbian love stories and kissing. @ericareadsqueer Isabel Waidner Isabel Waidner’s writing is electric. Kinetic, peripatetic, suspect, the reader knows as little about where they a

      1 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: C Pam Zhang

      Dec 11, 2019

      It was the last year of my third decade on this earth, and it seems with every passing year I grow increasingly alien to that earth, or it to me. The post A Year in Reading: C Pam Zhang appeared first on The Millions.

      4 min read

    • Article

      Chronicles From The Land Of The Happiest People On Earth Review – Nigeria Unmasked

      Oct 14, 2021

      Wole Soyinka won the Nobel prize for literature in 1986, the first black person to win the award. He is perhaps the most versatile of African writers, equally at home in all genres; his dramatic masterpieces, such as Kongi’s Harvest and Death and the

      3 min read

    • Article

      Akala, Bernardine Evaristo, Ben Okri And More Pick 20 Classic Books By Writers Of Colour

      Oct 3, 2021

      It wasn’t until I started university in 2008 that I truly realised how little regard there was for Black authors. My creative writing lecturer was a Black poet, whose teaching material and reading lists were saturated with authors of colour, but each

      16 min read

    • Article

      Elif Batuman on Fictionalizing Her Life, and Learning to Fact Check

      Mar 21, 2017

      In 2015, the New Yorker writer Elif Batuman was given a book contract to write an autobiographical novel about a Turkish-American journalist moving to Turkey to write for a New Yorker-like publication. Batuman herself had spent several years there wr

      7 min read

    • Article

      Oceans

      Mar 15, 2019

      I used to be interested in mountains. They moved at a speed I could deal with. They waited for me to catch up. It was like that all my life. Then we moved to California, and after eight years of earthquakes I began to doubt my ability to put things i

      12 min read

    • Article

      The Art of Nonfiction No. 11

      Dec 7, 2021

      The Art of Nonfiction No. 11
      26 min read

    • Article

      Angels In America

      Feb 27, 2018

      BIG ANGEL—PATRIARCH of the De La Cruz clan, “El Jefe” emblazoned on his coffee mug, a man who once “could make the walls crack with his voice”—is dying of cancer. Relegated to a wheelchair, he realizes that “somebody was going to have to put his shoe

      5 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Ismail Muhammad

      Dec 22, 2018

      More than anything else that I read this year, those two books made me appreciate the unlikeliness of my black life here in this golden state. The post A Year in Reading: Ismail Muhammad appeared first on The Millions.

      7 min read

    • Article

      Awake In The Scratchy Dark

      Sep 1, 2019

      Twelve years ago, I adopted a young baby in Vietnam and made myself a firm but vague promise not to “raise him white.” But what did that mean? To figure it out, I started to educate myself about race, trying to see how I, a white mother, might not me

      26 min read

    • Article

      The Genre Of Resistance

      Aug 15, 2018

      Mine (University of New Mexico Press, March), a collection of personal, lyric, and investigative essays about ownership—the corporeal, the familial, and the intellectual in form—as well as the realities of loss and isolation and the idea of belonging

      12 min read

    • Article

      Nora And The Jews

      Apr 20, 2023

      Nora Ephron was Jewish but glamorous. Jewish and glamorous. Glamorous, in part, because she was Jewish. The post Nora and the Jews appeared first on The Millions.

      18 min read

    • Article

      The Way We Were

      Jun 1, 2023

      The Way We Were
      7 min read

    • Article

      Penguin Pride.

      Jun 28, 2019

      Penguin Pride.
      16 min read

    • Article

      Past The Edges Of Town

      Jan 27, 2022

      Past The Edges Of Town
      10 min read

    • Article

      You and I Have Peril in Common: The Millions Interviews Saeed Jones

      Nov 21, 2019

      I hope this book helps people coming into themselves feel less alone—and less crazed by the way America lies to young people about what they experience. The post You and I Have Peril in Common: The Millions Interviews Saeed Jones appeared first on Th

      5 min read

    Reviews for How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America

    4.5/5

    52 ratings6 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      Great collection of essays, I am really looking forward to reading his novel now. I didn't really enjoy the Bernie Mac one because I am not familiar enough with him to have that essay resonate. The five letters essay brought me to tears, and the titular essay is very good (I read it more than once).
    • 5/5
      A unique writer with an underrepresented perspective. This collections of essays is intriguing and eye-opening.
    • 4/5
      This series of essays by African American writer Kiese Laymon makes for very uncomfortable reading. Among other things, he looks at growing up in Mississippi and he looks at race and racism in America. The fact that people of colour are always "on parole" strikes home particularly because of the almost constant news lately--though I guess it has always been that way and is just becoming more evident now to people in the comfortable middle class.
    • 5/5
      I discovered Laymon in Scratch and laughed out loud over the frustrations of the publishing business. Before I finished the essay, "You Are the Second Person," I ordered all of his books from Copperfield, my locally owned bookstore. Heart achingly true but told with wit, grace, and wisdom, these essays will become part of who you are forever.
    • 4/5
      Great stuff. A first book to be sure and some of the pieces don't belong in here. But Kiese Laymon on race, pop culture and family, I'd follow anywhere. When do we get essay collection the second?
    • 4/5
      Laymon writes of his Mississippi childhood, of learning how being black was probable cause and how the worst of white folks always put him at risk, of hip-hop, and other topics in this essay collection. I really like people who try to use techniques from one genre in another, so I was intrigued when he said he wanted the book to follow the form of some of his favorite albums, but I don’t think I got as much out of that as I could had I known the albums. The strongest work was what I’d read before in published essays—how white culture “forgot that it came to this country on a boat, then reacted violently when anything or anyone suggested it share,” how it forced “our mamas and grandmas to work themselves sick for a tiny sliver of an American pie it needed to believe it had made from scratch.” The worst of white folks is “all at once crazy-making and quick to discipline us for acting crazy. It had an insatiable appetite for virtuoso black performance and routine black suffering.” I also really loved this phrase for an unlovable experience: being “thirty cents away from a quarter.”