Thanks to @scribnerbooks for the gifted copy. QOTD: What author makes you pull out your wallet? After reading Heavy for the first time, Kiese Laymon has become an auto-buy and auto-gifter because he writes pure literary gold. His writing is poetic, magical, lyrical and thought-provoking. It is impossible to read one of his books and not want to chew your friends' ears off talking about them. Taking a page from @armyofwords book, here is the first line of this one: "LaVander Peele cares too much what white folks think about him." ➗ SYNOPSIS ➗ From Kiese Laymon, author of the critically acclaimed memoir Heavy, comes a “funny, astute, searching” (The Wall Street Journal) debut novel about Black teenagers that is a satirical exploration of celebrity, authorship, violence, religion, and coming of age in post-Katrina Mississippi. Written in a voice that’s alternately humorous, lacerating, and wise, Long Division features two interwoven stories. In the first, it’s 2013: after an on-stage meltdown during a nationally televised quiz contest, fourteen-year-old Citoyen “City” Coldson becomes an overnight YouTube celebrity. The next day, he’s sent to stay with his grandmother in the small coastal community of Melahatchie, where a young girl named Baize Shephard has recently disappeared. Before leaving, City is given a strange book without an author called Long Division. He learns that one of the book’s main characters is also named City Coldson—but Long Division is set in 1985. This 1985-version of City, along with his friend and love interest, Shalaya Crump, discovers a way to travel into the future, and steals a laptop and cellphone from an orphaned teenage rapper called...Baize Shephard. They ultimately take these items with them all the way back to 1964, to help another time-traveler they meet to protect his family from the Ku Klux Klan. City’s two stories ultimately converge in the work shed behind his grandmother’s house, where he discovers the key to Baize’s disappearance. #LongDivision #KieseLaymon #Scribner #BooksandMurals #BookPhotos #Bookstagram #BlackAuthors #BlackLiterature #Bookish #Bookdragon #bookish #BookFeature #BooksOutside #book (at The Bushwick Collective) https://www.instagram.com/p/CRCUbyarVrF/?utm_medium=tumblr