A Lucky Man: Stories [Paperback]

FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION

In the nine expansive, searching stories ofA Lucky Man, fathers and sons attempt to salvage relationships with friends and family members and confront mistakes made in the past. An imaginative young boy from the Bronx goes swimming with his group from day camp at a backyard pool in the suburbs, and faces the effects of power and privilege in ways he can barely grasp. A teen intent on proving himself a man through the all-night revel of JOuvert cant help but look out for his impressionable younger brother. A pair of college boys on the prowl follow two girls home from a party and have to own the uncomfortable truth of their desires. And at a capoeira conference, two brothers grapple with how to tell the story of their family, caught in the dance of their painful, fractured history.

Jamel Brinkleys stories, in a debut that announces the arrival of a significant new voice, reflect the tenderness and vulnerability of black men and boys whose hopes sometimes betray them, especially in a world shaped by race, gender, and classwhere luck may be the greatest fiction of all.

Each story is a trenchant exploration of race and class, vividly conveying the tension between social codes of masculinity and the vulnerable, volatile self.The New Yorker

[A Lucky Man] is intent on recognizing what masculinity looks like, questioning our expectations of it, and criticizing its toxicityand somehow managing to do all of that with love. . . . The collection may include only nine stories, but in each of them, Brinkley gives us an entire world.NPR.org

With equal parts precision and poetry, these nine audacil3J