About this Event
Join us for coffee, conversation, and community as we discuss Jason Mott's Hell of a Book on Wednesday, February 25th at 1:00pm. Winner of the 2021 National Book Award for Fiction and a finalist for the Carnegie Medal, Hell of a Book is a combination of metafiction, magical realism, satire, and social commentary about the Black American experience. Available wherever books are sold and from the Free Library of Philadelphia.
Jason Mott is the bestselling author of five novels, including his debut The Returned, which was adapted into the ABC series Resurrection in 2014. Mott is a National Endowment of the Arts Creative Writing Fellow, the recipient of the Sir Walter Raleigh Award, and a nominee for an NAACP Image Award and the Pushcart Prize, among many others. His most recent is People Like Us, a follow-up to Hell of a Book.
In Hell of a Book, an African-American author sets out on a cross-country book tour to promote his bestselling novel. That storyline drives Jason Mott’s novel and is the scaffolding of something much larger and more urgent: since his novel also tells the story of Soot, a young Black boy living in a rural town in the recent past, and The Kid, a possibly imaginary child who appears to the author on his tour.
Throughout, these characters’ stories build and build and as they converge, they astonish. For while this heartbreaking and magical book entertains and is at once about family, love of parents and children, art, and money, there always is the tragic story of a police shooting playing over and over on the news.
Who has been killed? Who is The Kid? Will the author finish his book tour, and what kind of world will he leave behind? Unforgettably powerful, an electrifying high-wire act, ideal for book clubs, and the book Mott says he has been writing in his head for ten years, Hell of a Book in its final twists truly becomes its title.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
The Welcome Table, 3233 West Hunting Park Avenue, Philadelphia, United States
USD 0.00
