Victor D. LaValle, born February 3, 1972, was raised in Flushing and Rosedale, Queens. He graduated from Cornell University with a degree in English and received his M.F.A. in Fiction from Columbia University. He has been a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He was a finalist for the Pen/Faulkner Award and Big Machine is the winner of an American Book Award. He serves as Director of the Fiction Concentration at Columbia University's School of the Arts.
He is married to Emily Raboteau who is the author of the novel, The Professor's Daughter, (Henry Holt, 2005) and the memoir, Searching for Zion (Grove Press, 2013).
The Devil in Silver: A Novel
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Hardcover: 432 pages
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau (August 21, 2012)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1400069866
ISBN-13: 978-1400069866
Product Dimensions: 6.4 x 1.4 x 9.5 inches
New Hyde Hospital’’s psychiatric ward has a new resident. It also
has a very, very old one.
Pepper is a rambunctious big man, minor-league troublemaker,
working-class hero (in his own mind), and, suddenly, the
surprised inmate of a budget-strapped mental institution in
Queens, New York. He’s not mentally ill, but that doesn’t seem
to matter. He is accused of a crime he can’t quite square with
his memory. In the darkness of his room on his first night, he’s
visited by a terrifying creature with the body of an old man and
the head of a bison who nearly kills him before being hustled
away by the hospital staff. It’s no delusion: The other patients
confirm that a hungry devil roams the hallways when the sun goes
down. Pepper rallies three other inmates in a plot to fight
back: Dorry, an octogenarian schizophrenic who’s been on the
ward for decades and knows all its secrets; Coffee, an African
immigrant with severe OCD, who tries desperately to send alarms
to the outside world; and Loochie, a bipolar teenage girl who
acts as the group’s enforcer. Battling the pill-pushing staff,
one another, and their own minds, they try to kill the monster
that’s stalking them. But can the Devil die?
The Devil in Silver brilliantly brings together the compelling
themes that spark all of Victor LaValle’s radiant fiction:
faith, race, class, madness, and our relationship with the
unseen and the uncanny. More than that, it’s a thrillingly
suspenseful work of literary horror about friendship, love, and
the courage to slay our own demons.
Lucretia
and the Kroons (ebook Novella)
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File Size: 1723 KB
Print Length: 100 pages
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau (July 23, 2012)
Sold by: Random House Digital, Inc.
Language: English
From one of the most acclaimed young writers of fiction in America today
comes a fast-paced and fantastical novella about a young girl’s journey into
a dark netherworld to find her missing best friend. This eBook edition
contains an exclusive excerpt from Victor LaValle’s new novel The Devil in
Silver, about which Gary Shteyngart raves, “Literary horror just found a new
master.”
Lucretia’s best friend and upstairs neighbor Sunny—a sweet pitbull of a kid,
even as she struggles with a mysterious illness—has gone missing. The only
way to get her back is for Lucretia to climb the rickety fire escape of
their Queens tenement and crawl through the window of apartment 6D, portal
to a vast shadowland of missing kids ruled by a nightmarish family of
mutants whose designs on the children are unknown. Her search for Sunny
takes Lucretia through a dark fantasyland where she finds lush forests
growing from concrete, pigeon-winged rodents, and haunted playgrounds. Her
quest ultimately forces her to confront the most frightening specter of all:
losing, forever, the thing you love the most.
Lucretia and the Kroons is a dazzlingly imaginative adventure story and a
moving exploration of the power of friendship and the terror of loss. This
all-new novella serves as the perfect companion piece to The Devil in
Silver, a thrillingly suspenseful work of literary horror that continues the
story of Lucretia.
Big
Machine
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Hardcover: 384 pages
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau (August 11, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0385527985
ISBN-13: 978-0385527989
Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.3 x 1.3 inches
'Big Machine is like nothing I've ever read,
incredibly human and alien at the same time. LaValle writes like
Gabriel Garcia Marquez mixed with Edgar Allen Poe, but this is
even more than that. He's written the first great book of the
next America.''Mos
Def
A fiendishly imaginative comic novel about doubt, faith, and the monsters we carry within us.
Ricky Rice was as good as invisible: a middling hustler, recovering dope fiend, and traumatized suicide cult survivor running out the string of his life as a porter at a bus depot in Utica, New York. Until one day a letter appears, summoning him to the frozen woods of Vermont. There, Ricky is inducted into a band of paranormal investigators comprised of former addicts and petty criminals, all of whom had at some point in their wasted lives heard The Voice: a mysterious murmur on the wind, a disembodied shout, or a whisper in an empty room that may or may not be from God.
Evoking the disorienting wonder of writers like Haruki Murakami and Kevin Brockmeier, but driven by Victor LaValle's perfectly pitched comic sensibility BIG MACHINE is a mind-rattling literary adventure about sex, race, and the eternal struggle between faith and doubt.
The Ecstatic
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Format:
Paperback, 288pp.
ISBN: 037571331X
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Pub. Date: Vintage
Release Date: October 14, 2003
The Ecstatic was selected for AALBC.com's March 2003 Reading List
Victor LaValle has already established himself as "one of the most eloquent
voices of the approaching century" (Kirkus Reviews), a writer of darkly humorous
tales full of haunting beauty, astonishing leaps of imagination, and language
that "crackles and hums" (Chicago Tribune). The Ecstatic is LaValle's debut
novel, a startling tale of love, horror, sex, insanity, faith, morbid obesity,
and the modern American family.
Something is wrong with Anthony'our 318-pound hero'and it's getting worse. A
monster has caught his uncle and his mother; now it wants Anthony. Mental
illness has been transmitted through his family's blood. The three women in his
life'his mother, younger sister, and grandmother'find him naked and disoriented
in his off-campus college apartment and take him home to Queens, each determined
to fix him in her own peculiar way. But his presence soon turns their house into
a semi suburban asylum.
Sweet but wickedly sarcastic, smart and heartbreakingly vulnerable, Anthony
narrates his family's surreal adventures through a world of grinning
exploitation and fake cures, from storefront evangelists and neighborhood loan
sharks to bogus beauty pageants and bootleg medical clinics. He corresponds with
a dreadlocked Japanese militant, is haunted by a vicious pack of dogs, and tries
to make his own horror movie, all in search of an answer to a question he
doesn't dare ask. Written in the tradition of misfit picaresque from Journey to
the End of the Night and Invisible Man to A Confederacy of Dunces and The World
According to Garp, The Ecstatic is the revelatory story of a family trying to
save themselves from a ravenous world and their own unraveling minds.
Slapboxing
with Jesus
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Paperback: 224 pages
Publisher: Vintage; 1st edition (October 5, 1999)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0375705902
ISBN-13: 978-0375705908
Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.2 x 0.6 inches
Winner of the PEN Open Book Award!
March 2000 AALBC.com Best Seller
"Twelve original and interconnected stories, Victor D. LaValle's astonishing, violent, and funny debut offers harrowing glimpses at the vulnerable lives of young people who struggle not only to come of age, but to survive the city streets."
"In "ancient history," two best friends graduating from high school fight to be the one to leave first for a better world; each one wants to be the fortunate son. In "pops," an African-American boy meets his father, a white cop from Connecticut, and tries not to care. And in "kids on Colden street" a boy is momentarily uplifted by the arrival of a younger sister only to discover that brutality leads only to brutality in the natural order of things."
Related Links
Lavalle's work is also included in: Step into a World: A Global Anthology of the New Black Literature
