"Tense and evocative . . . . Despite its powerful social critique, Vengeance is cautious and prismatic, openly troubled by its own claims to authority." - Katy Waldman, The New Yorker
As the narrator attempts to sort out what happened in King's life - paying visits to his devoted mother, his estranged young daughter and her mother, his girlfriend, his brother, and his cousin - the writer's own sense of identity begins to feel more and more like a fiction. He is one of the "free people" while Kendrick, who studies theology and philosophy, will never get his only wish, expressed plainly as "I just need to get out of here." The dichotomy between their lives forces the narrator to confront the violence in his own past, and also to reexamine American notions of guilt and penance, racial bias, and the inherent perversity of punitive justice.
It is common knowledge that we have an incarceration crisis in our country. Vengeance, by way of vivid storytelling, helps us to understand the failure of empathy and imagination that causes it.
Genre: Literary Fiction
As the narrator attempts to sort out what happened in King's life - paying visits to his devoted mother, his estranged young daughter and her mother, his girlfriend, his brother, and his cousin - the writer's own sense of identity begins to feel more and more like a fiction. He is one of the "free people" while Kendrick, who studies theology and philosophy, will never get his only wish, expressed plainly as "I just need to get out of here." The dichotomy between their lives forces the narrator to confront the violence in his own past, and also to reexamine American notions of guilt and penance, racial bias, and the inherent perversity of punitive justice.
It is common knowledge that we have an incarceration crisis in our country. Vengeance, by way of vivid storytelling, helps us to understand the failure of empathy and imagination that causes it.
Genre: Literary Fiction
Praise for this book
"Zachary Lazar's Vengeance is an elegant act of imagination and empathy that shows just how easily these can curdle, sometimes irretrievably, into skepticism and self-doubt. It's the story of a writer with a haunted past who meets, on a visit to Angola, a prisoner currently serving a life sentence for murder. Does he belong in prison, or is he, as he credibly claims, an innocent man? Or is the truth only ever a matter of speculation and the stories we choose to tell?" - Joshua Ferris
"I am stunned by the daring, meticulous, and unsentimental intelligence of this riveting book . . . Vengeance is a masterwork, the most important American book I've read this year, and the most moving and mesmerizing." - Francisco Goldman
"The state of Louisiana is the world's incarceration capital and Zachary Lazar, a resident of New Orleans, is a world-class novelist, who brings humility and sensitivity to this new book. The urgency of Lazar's subject, combined with his graceful submission to it, makes Vengeance incredibly timely, and also timeless in its value as art." - Rachel Kushner
"More than any book I’ve read in the twenty-first century, Zachary Lazar’s Vengeance makes the reader reckon with the questions of what’s real, what’s imagined, and why those questions matter more in 2017 than at any other time in our nation. . . . Vengeance reminds me of what is possible through deft, imaginative, ‘real’ storytelling." - Kiese Laymon
"I am stunned by the daring, meticulous, and unsentimental intelligence of this riveting book . . . Vengeance is a masterwork, the most important American book I've read this year, and the most moving and mesmerizing." - Francisco Goldman
"The state of Louisiana is the world's incarceration capital and Zachary Lazar, a resident of New Orleans, is a world-class novelist, who brings humility and sensitivity to this new book. The urgency of Lazar's subject, combined with his graceful submission to it, makes Vengeance incredibly timely, and also timeless in its value as art." - Rachel Kushner
"More than any book I’ve read in the twenty-first century, Zachary Lazar’s Vengeance makes the reader reckon with the questions of what’s real, what’s imagined, and why those questions matter more in 2017 than at any other time in our nation. . . . Vengeance reminds me of what is possible through deft, imaginative, ‘real’ storytelling." - Kiese Laymon
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