HOW I LEARNED TO HATE IN OHIO

“A moving and heartbreaking novel about what it means to be an outsider in America. David Stuart MacLean's penetrating look at growing up in the American Midwest in the 1980s is wickedly funny and sad and sobering all at once, a book that will spur endless conversation and thought.”
—Gillian Flynn

A brilliant, hilarious, and ultimately devastating novel about the beginnings of racial discord in America

In late-1980s rural Ohio, bright but mostly friendless Barry Nadler begins his freshman year of high school with the goal of going unnoticed as much as possible. But his world is upended by the arrival of Gurbaksh, Gary for
short, a Sikh teenager who moves to his small town and instantly befriends Barry. As their friendship deepens, Barry's classmates and neighbors react to the presence of a family so diff erent from theirs. Through darkly comic and bitingly intelligent asides and wry observations, Barry reveals how the seeds of xenophobia and racism fi nd fertile soil in this insular community.

How I Learned to Hate in Ohio shines an uncomfortable light on the roots of white middle-American discontent and the beginnings of the current cultural war. It is at once bracingly funny, dark, and surprisingly moving, an undeniably resonant debut for our divided world.

David MacLean teaches creative writing at the University of Chicago. His work has appeared widely in places such as the New York Times, Ploughshares, Guernica, and on the radio program This American Life. He is the winner of the PEN Emerging Writing Award for Nonfi ction, and he is the author of the award-winning memoir The Answer to the Riddle Is Me. He grew up in central Ohio and now lives in Chicago.

MacLean is the winner of the PEN Emerging Writer Award for Nonfction.