Welcome to Braggsville audiobook

WtB named to the Washington Post top ten list for 2015 …nothing was as it seemed On learning that the southern member of their group hails from a place that stages an annual Civil War re-enactment, one with a heavy Confederate tilt, four UC Berkeley sophomores decide to engage in a bit of political theater and protest the event by staging a mock lynching. What could possibly go wrong?A boy from the deep South who opts to pass on taking up shooting is likely to feel just a bit like an outsider in his small hometown. …when young he had admired their sarcasm and sharp wit, his older female cousins—the misanthrope, the pyromaniac, and the exhibitionist—all obviously hated their lives, lives that would never recover the hope of their youth, lives now defined by their status as old maids, though barely thirty. They were stuck here, and the finality of that sentence pained him. It was impossible to have a conversation with one of them and not feel like he was addressing a ghost. What’s in a name? D’Aron Davenport has them by the bushel. Not just the ones he was tagged with at birth, but the stream of names that attached to him through his brief life. Some of them celebrate achievement, some mark him as an outcast, some poke fun, and some offer respect. Some tell his history, and some hold a promise for the future. Many of these names will find their way back to D’Aron over the course of the story as he struggles to define himself in places where others seem intent on doing that for him. He would like to make a name for himself someplace other than Braggsville, Georgia. On graduating from high school, he gets as far away as he can.T. Geronimo JohnsonThere are some pretty funny scenes in Welcome to Braggsville. A symbol of the cluelessness of the place he desperately wants to leave behind, a classmate, after D’Aron delivers his valedictory, misunderstanding a Latin phrase from D’Aron’s speech, congratulates him on his engagement. In his second semester at UC Berkeley, or Berzerkeley, (Johnson teaches there, and knows of what he writes) as it is actually known, he attends a dot party (wear a dot where you want to be touched). Apparently the location he selects for his dot is deemed politically incorrect and he is shown the door by self-righteous alphas. He is not alone in his choice of dot location. The insight-free hosts have made three other attendees feel as welcome as Larry Kroger and Kent Dorfman at Omega Theta Pi, and a bond is forged. They call themselves “The 4 Little Indians.” Charlie, a black from Chicago, has the physique of an athlete. Candice is a naïve, over-confident Iowa blonde, who professes Native American heritage. I couldn’t help picturing young Gwyneth Paltrow. Louis Chang, a Californian who exudes comedy and thinks of himself as a “kung fu comedian” will make you laugh. What kind of southern white boy can D’Aron be that he feels so drawn to the scary Gully, (the wrong side of the tracks at home) and did not see all the darkness around him in the safe side of town? How is it that D’Aron finds that he feels quite comfortable with black people, while feeling more and more alienated from his lighter complexioned peers in B-ville? At Berkeley, he has a stunningly beautiful bonding experience with a black counselor. Where does he fit in? Charlie has issues of a different sort that keep him from feeling too close to his peers as well. A class called “American History X, Y, and Z: Alternative Perspectives” sparks the crew to action. After a failed attempt at making a political statement of outrage about the University’s treatment of Ishi, presumably the last wild Indian in America, at a Six Flags Amusement Park, a hilarious failure, the group settles on their larger, and more provocative project.There is a lot more going on here than comedy. An outsider theme applies not only to these four as students at Berzerkely, but for them in other venues as well. Louis is not exactly heading in a career direction his family would sanction. Charlie is not exactly what he appears. And Candice may not exactly be in a comfort zone with her family either. she’d once admitted that her family wasn’t close; that her father expressed a greater affinity for moths and fruit liqueurs and her mother a keen interest in civil rights. She dubbed them emotionally abusive. Johnson extends the outsider notion to larger structures as well. D’Aron may be a fish out of water in Braggsville, but what of the residents of the Gully? An entire community that is not allowed much opportunity to get near the water, let alone jump in. You can guess the complexion involved. Johnson has a bit of fun with how the media and political opportunists take advantage of the uproar in Braggsville. You will recognize the types of players involved, and appreciate the deft hand used in painting them in their true colors. He also takes liberties with form. The introduction of D’Aron and all his names is inspired. He also includes a sort-of term paper as it might have been written by the four in which barbecue stands in for racism, (ok, the author may or may not have intended this, sometimes barbecue is just barbecue, but I think it works as a racism metaphor even if it was not intended) an extended footnote that comprises Louis’s take on things, and other literary liberties as well. There is a freedom in this approach that is surprising in a good way and invigorating, reminding one of the creativity shown in A Visit from the Goon Squad.Johnson is focusing his literary microscope on preconceptions, left and right, and then looking past the visual to what lies beneath. The political correctness of liberal mecca UC Berkeley comes in for some sharp edges. As does the yahoo-ism of back-water Georgia. What Johnson brings to this impressive novel is his ability to look past that outer layer of knee-jerk satire. What one sees here is not uni-colored. There is also sensitivity to what compromises good people must make to survive in an alien environment, and there is nuance, even to the awfulness. In a large way this is a coming of age story for the group of friends, D’Aron most of all, and as such it works quite well, as D’Aron sees so much more than he had known was right in front of him. He gets to see how the real world operates and it changes him. Johnson uses some interludes to offer a bit of history on slavery in Georgia. I was surprised at some of this. I expect you will be as well. An observation of race is one of the many strong seams in this marbled look at America today. Parenting, whether by parents or other adults figures large as well. Even concepts like what constitutes tragedy are given a look. There are astute observations on a host of things. Here are a couple of samples: Every organization, every single one, Daron worries himself, orchestrates a silent competition with the church; they want not employees but practitioners, apostles, acolytes—not workers, but worshippers. Between this observation and his reflections on school, he concludes that everyone advertises for the mind but expects you to bring the soul. or Did his parents also look at each other with resentment born of intimacy; did they want more than anything else to reach out to each other, to close cold space; did they say things to hurt each other first intentionally and then again, accidentally, even without meaning to, in the midst of apologizing? Did they inventory their intimacies? How did you look at someone and care so much for them and hate them at the same time, be so angry that you didn’t even trust yourself to have a valid emotion, so angry it couldn’t be real? Links are drawn between the treatment of Native Americans and interned Japanese during World War II, between lynching of the traditional sort and a later day electronic equivalent, between anchors that ground one and those that keep you from moving, between being in one’s social bubble, and being in the world.Welcome to Braggsville is a stunning achievement. I was reminded not only of last year’s wonderful Billy Lynn’s Long Half-Time Walk for its brilliant and sensitive social observation, but also of Skippy Dies, one of my all-time favorite books, for its humor and warmth. It applies a sharp, satiric scalpel to diverse targets, but also peels back surfaces to reveal complication and humanity. D’Aron is a wonderfully realized lead, thoughtful, decent, engaging, struggling to find his place in various hostile universes. Eager to do right. This is a book that has at its core a racial tension, but there is so much more going on here. Head on over to Braggsville, pull up a chair, load a plate up with some barbecue, pop a cold one, and set a spell. Maybe talk to someone who is nothing at all like you. You will find your visit very filling indeed.Review first Posted – 10/3/14Publication Date – 2/17/14This review has been cross-posted on CootsReviews=============================EXTRA STUFFSeptember 17, 2015 - Braggsville is named to the longlist for the National Book Award September 21, 2015 - Braggsville is named to the Carnegie Awards long listLinks to the author’s personal, Twitter and FB pagesWhile the above links were live at the time I posted this, they are not all that current. I would expect that as publication date approaches Johnson will do some updating.Johnson wrote a wonderful Behind the Book essay for Braggsville. It is definitely worth checking out. An interesting interview with the author on the site of the publisher of his first book, Coffee House PressAnother fascinating interview, from a couple of years ago, on ZingMagazine.comAnd yet another interview, this one at Late Night LibraryFor a jaw-dropping review, check out Ron Charles's in the Washington PostFor another, try David Ulin's review in the LA TimesNPR chimes inCynthia Wu is an associate Prof at the University of Buffalo Transnational Studies Department. In her review, WELCOME, NOW KEEP OUT, she offers unique insight into B'ville. Check it out.

The most dazzling, most unsettling, most oh-my-God-listen-up novel you’ll read this year is called “Welcome to Braggsville.” The 44-year-old author, T. Geronimo Johnson, plays cultural criticism like it’s acid jazz. His shockingly funny story pricks every nerve of the American body politic. Arriving smack dab in the middle of Black History Month — our shortest month, naturally — “Braggsville” lashes self-satisfied liberals in the academy and self-deluded Confederates in the attic. As we feign surprise at police brutality and our Twitter outrage flits from Ferguson to Staten Island to Cleveland, this is just the discomfiting book we need.The story opens with Johnson’s scat-singing introduction to a polite white teen from Georgia named D’aron Little May Davenport. His whole life, D’aron has been mocked and bullied for his academic skill — a sure sign of wimpiness and questionable sexual orientation in a community that “produced more Special Forces soldiers per capita than any other town in America.” Desperate to get out of Braggsville, D’aron composes a series of college application essays — reproduced here in all their pimply teenage earnestness — that would excite any admissions officer’s savior complex.The class of academic satires has been overenrolled for a while now, but make room for this brilliant send-up of the postmodern, hypersensitive, non-essentializing, gender-neutral world of the University of California at Berkeley. (Johnson must have gorged on its absurdities when he earned a master’s degree there.) In this strange place, “where the elsewhere unimaginable was mere mundanity,” D’aron arrives like some Southern-fried Candide, dazzled by the foreign nomenclature, the “designer-sneaker Zapatistas” and the rainbow of races.Of course, satirizing this politically correct world is tantamount to euthanizing fish in a cruelty-free barrel, but Johnson is better at mocking academia than anybody since David Lodge, and his narration has such athleticism that you feel energized just running alongside him — or even several strides behind. His sentences are long and jaggy, sparked with stray cultural references. He dips unpredictably into other characters’ voices, volleying their jokes and pet phrases, nesting ironies within ironies. He feints between first and second person, he moonwalks into history, he spins from comedy to tragedy to editorial in a single paragraph. In short, Johnson does things you don’t think are advisable, which makes his success all the more awesome.But “Welcome to Braggsville” isn’t all linguistic acrobatics at the expense of its characters. Johnson writes about D’aron with real heart. He cradles this young man’s innocence and sympathizes with his desperation to fit in — which D’aron finally does during the second semester, when he meets a group of oddballs who call themselves “the 4 Little Indians” (Ironical reclamation of racist tropes is so empowering!) There’s Louis, a Malaysian American from the Bay Area, who wants to be “the next Lenny Bruce Lee, kung fu comedian”; Charlie, an African American from Chicago who looks like he’s on the football team; and Candice, who claims she’s part Native American and can out-outrage even the most self-righteous posers. (Don’t discount Johnson’s Apache middle name. To D’aron, so long denied any interesting friends, these three are a gift. He “desperately wanted to hug them all, and instead would settle for the huddles between bursts of Frisbee football.”The whole novel turns on a stray comment in a class called “American History, X, Y, and Z: Alternative Perspectives”: D’aron mentions that his home town stages a Civil War reenactment every year during its Pride Week Patriot Days Festival.The class is shocked. “They’d heard tell of Civil War reenactments,” Johnson writes, “but they were still occurring? The War Between the States was another time and another country. As was the South. Are barbers still surgeons? Is there still sharecropping? What about indoor plumbing? Like an old Looney Tunes skit, Tex Avery tag ensued. Charlie gawked at Louis, who gawped at Candice, who generously suggested it as a capstone project to the professor, who Googled the event and announced that it coincided with spring break. Serendipity has spoken.”“In the wink of a cat’s eye,” a clever, incredibly offensive, potentially disastrous plan is born: D’aron and his three friends will travel back to his hometown and stage a “performative intervention”: a mock lynching. “You can force States’ Rights to take a look in the mirror,” the professor crows, “and they will not like what they see.”From that bizarre premise hangs a story that will shock and disturb you. The trip to Braggsville — population 712, once a contender for the capital of Georgia — offers Johnson a chance to descend into the fetid pool of Southern pride that still romanticizes the antebellum era. D’aron’s parents and neighbors are perfectly pleasant people who just happen to have black lawn jockeys in their yards and racist bumper stickers on their trucks. It’s all in fun — Don’t you get it? How could these nice people be racists? — Braggsville is, after all, “The City That Love Built.” Everybody knows that the black people who live way off on the other side of town in the Gully are happy there. And that enormous Confederate flag wrapped around the watchtower? Just a symbol of civic pride. Yes, the town’s Civil War “reenactments were reinstated back in the 1950s in response to mandated integration,” but that doesn’t mean those nostalgic battle skits have anything to do with slavery. The war was about states’ rights, don’t you know?Johnson is a master at stripping away our persistent myths and exposing the subterfuge and displacement necessary to keep pretending that a culture built on kidnapping, rape and torture was the apotheosis of gentility and honor. But “Welcome to Braggsville” is not just a broadside at the South. It’s equally irritated with liberalism’s self-righteousness. The 4 Little Indians imagine that their moral superiority and clever theatricality will somehow shame and cleanse the townspeople who witness the faux lynching.When that ill-conceived plan goes horribly wrong, the narrative begins to bend and fracture — a virtual reflection of America’s crafty efforts to disguise and obfuscate its history of racial violence. Flecked with surrealism, the novel loops back on the “performative intervention” and its aftermath from different perspectives, exploring the malleability of meaning and the deadly effects of a culture that ignores or misunderstands its own prejudices. (Amid the op-ed frenzy that explodes after the mock lynching goes viral, Berkeley responds with a colloquium called “The Body Linguistic: Syntax, Sexicons, and Civil Rights.”)At times in this comic novel, I could hear strange echoes of another one about a well-meaning white kid striking out against the racist system of his day: Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” It, too, concludes with a humiliating “performative intervention”: a mock slave escape. But that comparison is clouded with complications as muddy as the Mississippi. A more contemporary soulmate may be Booker Prize-winner Howard Jacobson, who works in the same disorientingly witty way to explore the persistence of anti-Semitism. You think you know where both men stand, but the ground around them is slick with irony and blood.In light of new research from the Equal Justice Initiative about the prevalence of lynchings and the country’s demonic success at rendering them historically invisible, this extraordinary novel could not be more relevant. With young D’aron, Johnson forces us to consider our determined ignorance and naivete. Part of growing up in America, he knows, is learning how to negotiate that national amnesia.Welcome to Braggsville. It’s about time.This review first appeared in The Washington Post:http://www.washingtonpost.com/enterta...

Welcome to Braggsville is T. Geronimo Johnson's biting, loving, sparkling and spot-on satire of this US of A and especially matters of race, education, politics, regionalism and so many other "isms" (that we see before us on the news daily--a hyper reality now that has blossomed further since he wrote this book).In the basic tale, D'aron Davenport (who will henceforth have to justify, explain and possibly change or defend the spelling of his name) makes the decision to apply to UCBerkeley in order to get away from the small town existence of his home town in Georgia. It takes time, but eventually D'aron makes friends in Louis, the wanna-be comedian, Candice from Iowa with ultra do-good intentions, and Charlie, a thoughtful, and younger, kid from Chicago. They become the "4 Little Indians."And then there is an Alternative History class. Yes this is Berkeley. And D'aron happens to mention the Civil War reenactment held annually in his hometown. The class is aghast, yes aghast! And plans are made. Performance art, no "performance intervention" is the term. Berkeley will go to Braggsville in the persons of the 4 Little Indians. And the rest is, as they say, the rest of the story. And oh what a story.Satire done well is amazing; it takes no prisoners. I'm reminded of reading Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal many years ago, while in college. The reader is forced to confront many things (or ignore reality). Here the reader may see themselves in the students, the parents, the townspeople of Braggsville, the news media from out of town. The "guilty," the "innocent," (if indeed such titles possibly apply), the professors at Berkeley, whomever. Perhaps a little of everyone. Johnson uses a variety of writing styles. The mood, changing tempos, writing style and language all seem to feed the story for me. And masterful use of satire blasts away in all directions. (With little trickles of insight being shown in some characters)I do recommend this book highly but be aware it is not easy or comfortable. Satire is intended to arouse emotion AND thought.

A small cohort of Berkeley students descend on Braggsville to punk a Civil War re-enactment with a “performative intervention” as they stage a lynching. It goes horribly awry forcing a new perspective on the motives and actions of everyone involved. Hand-wringing millennials versed in academic theory whipped into liberal indignation go suddenly quiet when things leave the abstract and get suddenly real. The latent racism (you’re soaking in it) that surrounds us making it difficult to see. Our misguided motivations and how nothing is ever clearly black or white. It was a book that deserved more attention than my post-Christmas, holiday jag could devote and I found myself dragging through some chapters - but it's still sticking with me despite that.

(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

What is Welcome to Braggsville? Take a book like The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, except trade New Jersey and the Dominican Republic for rural Georgia and Berkeley. Change the Hispanic nerdy teenage boy to a white nerdy teenage boy. Add race and regionalism and politics and all sorts of ruminations on friendship, loyalty, and whether you can ever go home again or if you actually want to and VOILA: Welcome to Braggsville.Oscar Wao is a book I know many people love, and I want all those people to read this book. The comparison is a compliment, and the vitality of Johnson's voice reminded me not only of Diaz but other powerful writers like Sherman Alexie and Kiese Laymon (whose Long Division you must read immediately). They capture something big about becoming a man in the US and Johnson more than deserves a spot among them. I hesitate to discuss the plot much because every time you think you know what this book is about, it zags on you and you realize it's going in a totally different direction. The plot itself is quite simple, really, but I don't want to spoil it and I definitely don't want to spoil the way it takes you there as if you were blindfolded in the back of a speeding car. It pains me that this book will not be out until February. That I have to sit here for the next 6 months wanting so much to put it in the hands of everyone I know but that I am not able to do it. Just take my word for it and pre-order it. Now.

The writing is uniformly arresting and the story is wrenching and perfect until the end of ch. 16. After this high dramatic point, the novel remains very, very good. Only, I felt Johnson let go of the reins a little. For my taste he let style and introspection take precedence over story. I wanted more events to happen than did in the last half of the novel. I wanted there to be more consequences for what happened in the first half. I wanted to have the marvelous clash of cultures and ideologies that Johnson set up in the first half to be fulfilled by an equally dramatic climax in the second. I wanted this book to be the Bonfire of the Vanities of the 21st century. Instead, the story retreated into something thoughtful, something nuanced, something personal; nothing like the big novel of social commentary I expected, and nothing like what I thought Johnson seemed to be gearing up for in the first half. It was a great read until the end, though--even if it wasn't exactly the read I wanted it to be.

I read this in 2014, but since it is a 2015 pub, I waited to review it so I can remember it in my "Books of 2015" lists. Because I thought it was fantastic.Anything a person wants in a book is here. Great great language, humor, satire, ridiculous situations, a changing and often skewed perspective, to be kept guessing. What you think is going to be one thing consistently becomes something else. EVERYTHING works here - plot, language, characters, setting. Not since Cloud Atlas have I read a book that makes me happy to read it and makes me know I could never be a writer because I am just not as brilliant as the author. I hope this book finds as big a readership as the book it is often compared to, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

Whew! This is certainly a challenging read, very non-traditional, flushing all conventions that we normally associate with novels. No neat narration, no quotations to easily delineate the speakers, no simple and easy settings. Well all of that, along with the story is what makes it a 4 star effort. Rhythm, that is what it takes to make this a winning read for you, when one writes in a style that is...challenging, it takes effort by the reader to to catch the beat of the writer and the novel will flow like any other. It's almost like listening to music, and once the rhythm sets in, you find yourself bobbing your head. The novel is heavy with satire and irony, even drawing attention to these obvious elements in some sentences, "Daron would get frustrated, growing more so when Louis would innocently ask the professor if sarcasm, social niceties, and euphemism were all irony's close cousins. The professor agreed."The story centers around Daron, a native of Braggsville, Ga. He goes off to college to UC Berkeley and meets 3 students and they become fast friends. Through a course they are all taking together, they get the bright idea to stage a "performative intervention" in Daron's hometown of Braggsville to protest the long standing reenactment of the civil war, which Braggsville holds every year. Well the intervention goes horribly wrong and allows the author to satirize and ironize subjects and objects. This is where the book really takes takes off, as the novel takes shots at racism, sexism, blackness, privilege and sexual identity and some other things. This is all done with powerful, majestic prose. I must admit that at times the language seems to be showy for showy's sake. It is a little bit overwritten in spots, but no so much that it becomes a major distraction. It is a novel that will challenge you as a reader and maybe some long held beliefs, but if you are looking for easy and simple keep searching. This is challenging and rewarding.

There are people who shouldn't read this book. If you believe that Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh write historically accurate books, don't read this one. If you feel secure in your own beliefs, because that's the way it's always been, and it's always worked just fine, thank you very much...don't read this book. Actually, you SHOULD read Welcome to Braggsville, but you probably won't like it. This book is highly provocative. I consider myself to be an open-minded liberal person, and I felt poked and prodded by every page.Welcome to Braggsville is up-to-the-minute contemporary. Had it gone to press six months later, I suspect there would have been references to, "Hands up, don't shoot" and "I can't breathe," in addition to Trayvon Martin. But, don't misunderstand. This is not a story about police brutality. It's about growing up and coming to terms with who you are and what you believe...and why. It's about racism, sexism, homophobia, small-mindedness and the need to find a place to fit in. To those of you who choose to read Welcome to Braggsville: Find someone to read with you, preferable someone who is not like you. You'll have plenty to talk about...and learn about yourself and them.

Holy toledo. I needed that. I'm rendered speechless. Just... read it.