Fellowship. He was a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Award. His short fiction has appeared in ESPN The Magazine, Oxford American, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Mississippi Review, Subtropics, Chattahoochee Review, Hotel Amerika, and many other publications, and he has written about college football for GQ online and Grantland. He was born in Florida and now resides in Minnesota, where he teaches at Hamline University in St. Paul.
Brandon's new book is Penalties of June.
At Electric Lit he tagged nine books that give "a dizzying tour of divergent Florida experiences and styles whose kinship, if they share any, is tied up in heat and crime and displacement and unpredictability." One title on the list:
The Nickel Boys by Colson WhiteheadRead about another entry on the list.
Based on the true horror story of the Dozier School for Boys in the Florida panhandle, this is simply one of the best books I’ve read. An instant classic. It succeeds on every level a novel might—complex, compelling characters; vivid, charged setting; heart-wrenching plot; narrative inventiveness—and at the same time illuminates real historical events. For my money, it easily outshines Whitehead’s other Pulitzer-winning novel, The Underground Railroad. Elwood Curtis, the protagonist of The Nickel Boys, is one of the best drawn and most genuinely sympathetic main characters you’ll come across—the devastation you’ll feel at his (and all the boys at Nickel Academy) treatment is only magnified by the fact that the real place only closed down in 2011.
The Nickel Boys is among Rebecca Bernard’s seven top complex portraits of criminality in literature and Zak Salih's eight books about childhood friendships throughout the years.
--Marshal Zeringue
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