Research Catalog

Dead in Long Beach, California

Title

Dead in Long Beach, California / Venita Blackburn.

Author

Blackburn, Venita

Publication

Description

228 pages; 22 cm

Summary

"A form-shifting and soul-crunching chronicle of grief and crisis, Venita Blackburn's debut novel, Dead in Long Beach, California, is a fleet-footed marvel of self-discovery and storytelling that explores the depths of humankind's capacity for harm and healing. With the daring, often hilarious imagination that made her an acclaimed short-fiction innovator, Blackburn crafts a layered, page-turning reckoning with what it means to be alive, dead, and somewhere in between." -- Publisher annotation.
Coral is the first person to discover her brother Jay's dead body in the wake of his suicide. There's no note, only a drably furnished bachelor pad in Long Beach, California, and a cell phone with a handful of numbers in it. Coral pockets the phone. And then she starts responding to texts as her dead brother. Over the course of one week, Coral, the successful yet lonely author of a hit dystopian novel, Wildfire , becomes increasingly untethered from reality. Blindsided by grief and operating with reckless determination, she doubles and triples down on posing as her brother, risking not only her own sanity but her relationship with her precocious niece, Khadijah. As Coral's swirl of lies slowly closes in on her, the quirky and mysterious alien world of Wildfire becomes enmeshed in her own reality, in the process pushing long-buried memories, traumas, and secrets dangerously into the present.

Subject

Genre/Form

ISBN

LCCN

2023030820

OCLC

YBP 2023030820

Author

Blackburn, Venita, author.

Title

Dead in Long Beach, California / Venita Blackburn.

Publisher

New York : MCD / Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2024.

Copyright Date

Edition

First edition.

Type of Content

text

Type of Medium

unmediated

Type of Carrier

volume