How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America
By Kiese Laymon
4.5/5
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About this ebook
In How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, Laymon deals in depth with his own personal story, which is filled with trials (and reflections on those trials) that illuminate under-appreciated aspects of contemporary American life. As revealed in the book's title essay, Laymon attended three colleges before earning his undergraduate degree. He was suspended from the first of these institutions, Millsaps College, following a probationary period resulting from a controversial essay he published on campus. As the school's president described it, the "Key Essay in question was written by Kiese Laymon, a controversial writer who consistently editorializes on race issues." Controversy seemed to follow this young writer, but as he himself puts it, "my job is to ask questions, to broaden the scope of American literature by broadening the scope of who is written to and imaginatively writes back."
Laymon voice is something new and unexpected in contemporary American writing, mixing a colloquial voice with acerbic wit, sharp insights, and blast-furnace heat that calls to mind no one so much as a black 21st-century Mark Twain. Much like Twain, Laymon's writing is steeped in controversial issues both private and public. From his biting critiques of race politics to revelations of his own internal struggles with American "blackness," Laymon taps into an ongoing conversation that is played out consciously and subconsciously across all of our artistic, cultural, political, and economic realities.
This collection introduces Laymon as a writer who balances volatile concepts on a razor's edge, and who chops up much-discussed and often-misunderstood topics with his scathing humor and fresh, unexpected takes on the ongoing absurdities, frivolities, and calamities of American life.
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
Heavy: An American Memoir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Long Division: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: Essays Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Oliver Stone Experience (Text-Only Edition) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
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Reviews for How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America
47 ratings6 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Great 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).
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A unique writer with an underrepresented perspective. This collections of essays is intriguing and eye-opening.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Great 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?
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I 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.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Laymon 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.”
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This 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.