Stories of a young man finding his place among family and community in Houston, from a powerful, emerging American voice.
In the city of Houston - a sprawling, diverse microcosm of America - the son of a black mother and a Latino father is coming of age. He's working at his family's restaurant, weathering his brother's blows, resenting his older sister's absence. And discovering he likes boys. Around him, others live and thrive and die in Houston's myriad neighbourhoods: a young woman whose affair detonates across an apartment complex, a ragtag baseball team, a group of young hustlers, hurricane survivors, a local drug dealer who takes a Guatemalan teen under his wing, a reluctant chupacabra.
Bryan Washington's brilliant, viscerally drawn world vibrates with energy, wit, and the infinite longing of people searching for home. With soulful insight into what makes a community, a family, and a life, Lot explores trust and love in all its unsparing and unsteady forms.
About the Author
Bryan Washington has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, BuzzFeed, Vulture, The Paris Review, Tin House, One Story, Bon Appetit, MUNCHIES, American Short Fiction, GQ, FADER, The Awl, and Catapult. He lives in Houston.
Industry Reviews
Lot is a phenomenal debut, the kind of stories I am always longing to read. I love the urgency, honesty, and vitality of Washington's voice. I love these characters for where they're from, and where they're going, what they know, and what they reveal about trouble and love. * Justin Torres, author of 'We the Animals' *
What a book. This is a generous, powerful, deeply engrossing collection of stories that will crack open your heart then put it back together again. Lot is indelible, and Bryan Washington is an important new talent. * R.O. Kwon, author of 'The Incendiaries' *
Bryan Washington's writing is refreshing - a brilliant display of raw talent with gut punching stories that deliver with a lasting force. This is the literature that I've been waiting for. * Nicole Dennis-Benn, author of 'Here Comes the Sun' *
Lot is the confession of a neighborhood, channeled through a literary prodigy. Bryan Washington doesn't render a world, he actually captures one, grabs it out of reality and holds it up for you to see it sparkle. Unflinching, romantic while refusing to romanticize; this is the debut of a prodigious talent. * Mat Johnson, author of 'Loving Day' and 'Pym' *
Bryan Washington's voice has risen blazingly from Houston and now commands us to pay attention. Lot is as raw, soulful and moving as a story collection can get. It's my favorite fiction debut of the year. * Jami Attenberg, author of 'The Middlesteins' *
Bryan Washington gets Houston down on the page in a way I haven't seen before; the city, in his hands, is revealed in all its strange and righteous glory, a fresh sense of youth that's a pleasure to read. Bryan is a thrilling new voice in American fiction and one to watch. * Amelia Gray, author of 'Isadora' *
In his raw, empathic and wise debut collection, Bryan Washington's gaze works like a surveillance drone dispatched to a frenetic microcosm of America, a hovering intelligence that can take in the whole of a Houston neighborhood but can also descend with great precision upon the perfectly chosen detail. It's that astonishing versatility of his voice - at once achingly intimate and brilliantly panoramic - that makes LOT a vital new entry in the Texas literary canon and also makes Washington one of the most thrilling and promising writers to come along in years. * Stefan Merrill Block, author of 'The Story of Forgetting' *
Lot will affect you the way that cherished and, sometimes, painful memories do, with a quality like haunting, a sense that the encounter you've had is undeniably real and will stay with you for a very long time. What a thrill to inhabit-to live in, to navigate-the stories and people that make up Bryan Washington's powerful debut. * Jamel Brinkley, author of 'A Lucky Man' *
