Jamel Brinkley

Harvard Book Store and GrubStreet welcome JAMEL BRINKLEY—a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop whose fiction appeared in The Best American Short Stories 2018—for a discussion of his debut book, A Lucky Man: Stories. He will be joined in conversation by award-winning writer MARGOT LIVESEY.

About A Lucky Man

In the nine expansive, searching stories of A Lucky Man, fathers and sons attempt to salvage relationships with friends and family members and confront mistakes made in the past. An imaginative young boy from the Bronx goes swimming with his group from day camp at a backyard pool in the suburbs, and faces the effects of power and privilege in ways he can barely grasp. A teen intent on proving himself a man through the all-night revel of J’Ouvert can’t help but look out for his impressionable younger brother. A pair of college boys on the prowl follow two girls home from a party and have to own the uncomfortable truth of their desires. And at a capoeira conference, two brothers grapple with how to tell the story of their family, caught in the dance of their painful, fractured history.

Jamel Brinkley’s stories, in a debut that announces the arrival of a significant new voice, reflect the tenderness and vulnerability of black men and boys whose hopes sometimes betray them, especially in a world shaped by race, gender, and class―where luck may be the greatest fiction of all.

Praise

"A Lucky Man is filled with characters who long to become better sons, better fathers, better friends, better lovers. Often they have no words for their complicated feelings. Happily, they are the creations of an author who has all the words. Jamel Brinkley is a wonderful writer and these richly imagined stories will stay with the lucky reader long after the last page." —Margot Livesey, author of Mercury

"Jamel Brinkley’s A Lucky Man captures so perfectly the myriad ways in which we struggle daily not only for connection but to be heard and understood. At once covert and exuberant, ferocious and tender, heartbreaking and hilarious, these are the stories we always needed. A marvelous debut, glowing with life, and a major new voice in American fiction." —Paul Yoon, author of The Mountain

“A Lucky Man is intent on recognizing what masculinity looks like, questioning our expectations of it, and criticizing its toxicity―and somehow managing to do all of that with love . . . The collection may include only nine stories, but in each of them, Brinkley gives us an entire world.” ―NPR

“Each story is a trenchant exploration of race and class, vividly conveying the tension between social codes of masculinity and the vulnerable, volatile self." ―The New Yorker