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Fritz Agency
Christian Dittus
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English

DIDN'T NOBODY GIVE A SHIT WHAT HAPPENED TO CARLOTTA

James Hannaham

The raucous, irreverent, and harrowing story of a trans woman's reentry into life on the outside after more than twenty years in a men's prison, over one eventful Fourth of July weekend in Brooklyn—from the author of the PEN/Faulkner Award winner Delicious Foods.

Carlotta Mercedes has been misunderstood her entire life. When she was pulled into a robbery gone wrong, she still went by the name she'd grown up with in Fort Greene, Brooklyn—before it gentrified. But not long after her conviction, she took the name Carlotta and began to live as a woman, an embrace of selfhood that prison authorities rejected, keeping Carlotta trapped in an all-male cell block, abused by both inmates and guards, and often placed in solitary.

But in her fifth appearance before the parole board, Carlotta is at last granted conditional freedom and given a bus ticket back to a New York City that has changed as much in the intervening decades as she herself has changed to those who knew her before she was sent away. Can she reconcile with the son she left behind and reunite with a family reluctant to accept her as Carlotta, all while complying with near-impossible parole restrictions and doing everything in her power to stay out of jail?

Written with the same mischievous verve and astonishing freshness in Delicious Foods, which dazzled critics and readers alike, Didn't Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta sweeps the reader through seemingly every street of Brooklyn in a whirlwind Fourth of July weekend. The novel sings with brio and ambition, offering a fantastically entertaining read and a cast of unforgettable characters even as it challenges us to confront the glaring injustices of a prison system that continues to punish people even after they've been freed.

James Hannaham is the author of the novels God Says No, which was honored by the American Library Association and Delicious Foods, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and was an LA Times Prize and Dayton Literary Peace Prize finalist as well as a New York Times Notable Book. He holds an MFA from the Michener Center at the University of Texas at Austin, and lives in Brooklyn, where he teaches creative writing at the Pratt Institute.
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Published 2022-10-01 by Little, Brown (US)

Comments

"Hannaham often starts paragraphs with omniscient third-person descriptions followed by abrupt, unpunctuated interruptions by Carlotta. (“Carlotta turned on her heel and rushed back to the subway Yo this shit's too much a too much!”) It's an effective rhetorical technique, showing her urge to take control of the narrative while counteracting the kinds of ‘official' narratives that get the story wrong about women like her. It also simply makes Carlotta's story engrossing reading. Carlotta's travels through Fort Greene, Brooklyn, during the day or so the novel tracks are only moderately eventful—finding her parole officer, applying for a job, visiting family, attempting to drive a car, attending a wake—but all of it is enlivened with her commentary In parts the book reads like a time-travel story, as Carlotta observes changes in technology, manners, and her old stomping grounds. And in its day-in-the-life framing, hyperlocality, and rhetorical invention, it's also an homage to Ulysses, whose ending is flagrantly echoed here. Carlotta deserves a lot of things society rarely provides to women like her—among them, a role in great fiction. Hannaham gives Carlotta her due. A brash, ambitious novel carried by an unforgettable narrator." (starred review)

"Carlotta's journey from Ithaca, carrying her talisman, antagonizing a one-eyed man, and plunging into a drug-induced fever dream while seeking a lost son, echoes another linguistically brilliant novel, James Joyce's Ulysses. Yet Hannaham (Pilot Imposter, 2021), winner of the PEN/Faulkner and Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Delicious Foods (2015), has created a gloriously original character with an unmistakable voice and an unforgettable story." (starred review)

"The book concludes with Carlotta's version of the soliloquy with which Molly Bloom ends James Joyce's Ulysses... It sends us back through the novel, realizing perhaps only now that Brooklyn is Carlotta's Dublin and her time on parole her Bloomsday. It's a daring move, paraphrasing a masterpiece, but James Hannaham shows us why a writer might do it. The passage makes us see that his heroine could be the prodigal Blatina daughter of Clarissa Dalloway and Leopold Bloom—and that modernism has been waiting, all this time, to welcome Carlotta home." Read more...

Finalist, Gotham Book Prize ($50,000 award sum) Finalist, 2022 Lambda Literary Award Finalist, 2023 Joyce Carol Oates Prize Read more...

“Lovingly linguistic and equal parts Zora Neale Hurston, Chester Himes, and the now mythical Stagg R. Leigh, this refreshingly cool look at the new New York through old eyes is the Blackest book I've read in years. Carlotta is more than one to remember, she's a treasure.” ?Paul Beatty, Booker Prize–winning author of The Sellout "As if by means of some mashup of Hubert Selby, Darius James, and Bruce Wagner, James Hannaham's tripwire provocations and dazzling verbal fireworks give way to a fathomless tenderness and remorse. His Carlotta is spectacularly Brooklyn and devastatingly human all the way down to the bone." ?Jonathan Lethem, New York Times bestselling author of Motherless Brooklyn “This is the fastest, funniest, and most furious novel I've read in ages. In James Hannaham's blistering prose, his heroine's return from the American gulag to gentrified Brooklyn becomes an odyssey through the absurd, cruel, and sometimes miraculous condition of being poor, Black, and trans in a system and a city determined to erase the Carlottas of this world. The book is a tour de force of a spirit undefeated by this journey.” —Adam Haslett, author of the national bestseller and Pulitzer Prize finalist Imagine Me Gone “James Hannaham's Carlotta is an astonishing act of empathy and identification, which will shake readers out of their torpor and remind them that fiction at its highest is a form of metempsychosis. Carlotta steps off the page and into your room, and stands there, implacable, educating you on her terms.” —Lucy Santé, author of Through A Different Lens and The Other Paris “Maybe the comic novel is the best way to explore some of the least funny aspects of our society. Maybe the justice system is so immoral, the forces of capitalism so relentless, the treatment of some of our citizens so indefensible, that we have no choice but to turn heartbreak into hilarity, to laugh. Carlotta is a beautiful, unsettling book. The title is a trick; James Hannaham gives a shit, and so should everyone else.” —Rumaan Alam, New York Times bestselling author of Leave the World Behind “Set over the course of a Fourth of July weekend, Hurston/Wright Legacy Award-winning author James Hannaham's latest novel is at once irreverently funny and devastatingly sad, a quixotic tale about the queerness of missed time; how, for the most marginalized, the shackles of the past and uncertain promises of the future make dwelling in the present seem impossible.” —Electric Lit

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