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 lives in Brooklyn and teaches writing at Columbia University.

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

Read and AALBC.com Review

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!

Related Links

Official Website
http://www.victorlavalle.com/

Lavalle's work is also included in:

Step into a World: A Global Anthology of the New Black Literature
edited by Kevin Powell
http://aalbc.com/authors/step_into_a_world.htm

Washington Post Article
From Fat To Phat: An Author's Happy Ending
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A1261-2002Dec2.html