Praise for Delicious Foods
"[A] sensational new novel about the tenacity of racism and its bizarre permutations... bounce[s] off the page with the sharpest, wittiest, most unsettling cultural criticism I've read in years... Hannaham is a propulsive storyteller... the whole story speeds through the dark... never takes its foot off the gas... An archetypal tale of American struggle... Reminiscent of Edward P. Jones's The Known World...[A] fantastically creative performance... [An] insightful and ultimately tender novel... You will devour this book."—Ron Charles, Washington Post
"A writer of major importance... Moments of deft lyricism are Hannaham's greatest strength, and those touches of beauty and intuitive metaphor make the novel's difficult subject matter easier to bear... The novel's finest moments are... in the singular way that Hannaham can make the commonplace spring to life with nothing more than astute observations and precise language."—New York Times Book Review
"Hannaham's prose is gloriously dense and full of elegant observations that might go unmade by a lesser writer. There is a great warmth in this novel that tackles darkness... [Hannaham] creates full-bodied characters. Even the minor figures are drawn with subtle details... Hannaham's decision to give a voice to crack—in the character Scotty—occasions some lively and inventive writing. Scotty has swagger and a sly sense of humor, and when he narrates he holds your attention... The character is complex, both tender and ruthless... A grand, empathetic, and funny novel about addiction, labor exploitation, and love... Delicious Foods should be read for its bold narrative risks, as well as the heart and humor of its author's prose."—Roxane Gay, Bookforum
"Harrowing... Hannaham details a cycle of despair and enslavement in the poverty-ridden South... What emerges is the powerful tale of a place whose past is 'a ditch so deep with bodies it could pass for a starless night.'"—The New Yorker
"Delicious Foods has plenty of magic in it, and plenty of tragedy... A powerful allegory about modern-day slavery, Delicious Foods explores the ways that even the most extraordinary black men and women are robbed of the right to control their own lives... [Hannaham] is serious about investigating the long-term effects of internalized racism, and the despair that prevents people from helping themselves... A sharp critique of the American belief that you can do anything as long as you work hard."—Entertainment Weekly
"The novel's unforgettable cast... satisfies all our readerly cravings and without ostentation... The story's twists are at times implausible but nonetheless are a great feat of imagination. Hannaham has put his characters in the perfect conditions for these issues to play out—and for us to believe them... From what we've seen go down at Delicious, from the tenacity of this mother and son, we know it's love that keeps us going. Love is a rock every bit as hard as those diamond stars. Its indestructible beauty is enough to break down the earthly rocks that are its meager imitations."—The Rumpus
"James Hannaham's satirical and darkly humorous look at racism, drugs, and the American South begins intensely... and doesn't let up... This brutal and beautiful tome is irresistible."—USA Today
"Delicious Foods is not a story about the death of the American Dream, but an illumination of the fantasies that surround it, and the denial that permits us to believe in its innocence. It is also a compelling and haunting tale of family, responsibility, and endurance."—Guernica
"An audacious, heartbreaking story... that is intended to be allegorical, but unearths a horror that is real and whose roots reach all the way back to slavery... Hannaham brilliantly creates a metaphor for human trafficking, modern-day industrialism, the pernicious effects of the war on drugs, and society's greedy need for 'quality' delivered as cheaply as possible... Delicious Foods stay[s] in the mind... A breathtaking depiction of how difficult is to break a spirit down, and how stubborn and resilient people can be. "—Maclean's
"Strange and often haunting, Hannaham's brilliant look at the parent and child relationship, and the things that can tear that normally unbreakable bond apart, could be one of the best novels of 2015."—Men's Journal
"Disturbing and addictive... This dark story is horrific, engrossing, deeply moving, and surprisingly funny at times... The subject matter in this tale of survival is uncomfortable and unfortunately all-too believable, but Hannaham's inventive storytelling and care for his characters fill this bleak world with much needed hope and love. Delicious Foods is hard to swallow at times, but also hard to put down."—Winnipeg Free Press
"In lesser hands, Delicious Foods could easily have been a dark and dreary saga of misery and pain. Instead, Hannaham gleefully rides the lightness. There is no dwelling in sorry here—only movement to find a way forward to something better. No matter how bad things get, you are breathing, you are alive. Therein lies the joy."—The Root
05/30/2022
PEN/Faulkner award winner Hannaham (Delicious Foods) returns with a timely if sometimes frustrating depiction of life on the edges of America’s prison-industrial complex. Carlotta Mercedes comes home to Brooklyn after serving more than 20 years in prison for armed robbery. Carlotta, a Black and Colombian trans woman who was abused in prison, is a live wire, by turns self-pitying, angry, thoughtful, and raunchily funny. Carlotta’s series of antic encounters with family members, her parole officer, and old friends from the neighborhood doesn’t amount to much of a story, but it gives plenty of opportunities for Carlotta to riff and grouse. Late in the book, after she’s robbed of $500 she’d tucked in her underwear next to what she calls her Señora Problema, Carlotta imagines the thief trying to spend the money at a department store: “I’m sorry, Sir, this money reeks a pussy. Bloomingdale policy be that we don’t assept no kinda pussystank moneys.” She has plenty of wit and verve, and readers are sure to cheer on Carlotta’s doomed efforts to stay clean and out of trouble, but, even so, the underplotted chronicle tends to lag. It’s fun for a while, but it’s not the author’s best. Agent: Doug Stewart, Sterling Lord Literistic. (Aug.)
★ 12/01/2022
Hannaham's (Delicious Foods) latest opens as Carlotta Mercedes is granted parole after 20 years in a men's prison. In short, a trans woman transitions from incarceration to release just in time for the Fourth of July weekend in the now unfamiliar Brooklyn neighborhood of her youth. Carlotta wants to reconcile with her son and reacquaint herself with her family, all while not violating the conditions of her parole. Her homecoming is a chaotic mess, but she faces each situation with optimism and figures her way through it. Dual readers Flame Monroe and Hannaham make the shifting voice and perspectives easy to follow. Hannaham is the star of the show, voicing Carlotta as a resilient, energetic delight who holds surprisingly few grudges after years of abuse while serving time for a crime she did not commit, knowing that it will take everything she's got to maintain her freedom. Listeners are privy not only to what she says, but also to what she thinks. VERDICT This masterpiece of absurdist humor uses the narration to elevate the text and is highly recommended for public library collections.—Christa Van Herreweghe
01/01/2022
International award winner Cercas expands to literary suspense inEven the Darkest Night, featuring a young ex-con who read Les Misérables in jail and after the murder of his sex-worker mother joins the Barcelona police and is sent to investigate a particularly brutal double murder outside the city. In another genre blender, the New York Times best-selling Crosley purveys humor, psychological twistiness, and strong writing to create what could be a Cult Classic featuring a woman who leaves a work dinner to buy cigarettes and encounters a string of ghostly ex-boyfriends (100,000-copy first printing). From Dermansky (e.g., the multi-best-booked The Red Car), Hurricane Girl sends 32-year-old Allison Brody from the West Coast to the East Coast, where she buys a small house on the beach and is promptly hit by a Category 3 hurricane that leaves her with a bleeding head and some very confused thoughts. Following Delicious Foods, which boast PEN/Faulkner and Hurston/Wright Legacy honors, Hannaham's Didn't Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta features a woman who transitioned in prison and is finally released after more than two decades, returning apprehensively to a New York she barely knows and a family that doesn't understand her (40,000-copy first printing). Winner of the Publishing Triangle's Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement, Holleran returns after 13 years with The Kingdom of Sand, whose nameless narrator has survived the death of friends from AIDS and his parents from old age and tragedy and is surviving his own end time by enjoying classic films and near-anonymous sexual encounters (50,000-copy first printing). In Laskey's So Happy for You, following Center for Fiction First Novel finalist Under the Rainbow, Robin and Ellie have always been best friends, but queer academic Robin has her doubts about being maid of honor in Ellie's forthcoming wedding. In the medieval-set Lapnova, from ever-edgy, New York Times best-selling Moshfegh, hapless shepherd's son Marek—close only to a midwife feared for her ungodly way with nature—is caught up in the violence surrounding a cruel and corrupt lord. In this follow-up to Newman's multi-starred The Heavens, all The Men in the world mysteriously vanish at once, leaving women both to grieve and to rebuild. Prix Marguerite Yourcenar winner Nganang follows up hisLJ best-booked When the Plums Are Ripe with A Trail of Crab Tracks, whose protagonist slowly reveals his story—and the story of Cameroon's independence—on a prolonged stay with his son in the United States. The dedicated assistant principal at a New Jersey public high school thinks she has a lock on the principal's job when the current principal retires, but alas for the durable protagonist of Perrotta's Election, Tracy Flick [still] Can't Win (300,000-copy first printing). In Thrust, a motherless child from the late 21st century learns that she can connect with people over the last two centuries, from a French sculptor to a dictator's daughter; from Yuknavitch, a Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize finalist.
When Carlotta Mercedes is paroled after 20 years and four parole board rejections, she finally gets to live her life as the woman she is instead of the man who went to prison. Author James Hannaham narrates the third-person elements of his novel in a straightforward manner. His performance gets a boost from trans comedian Flame Monroe as Carlotta, whose ruminations, expectations, recriminations, and, most of all, sharp observations are given voice as she rediscovers Brooklyn, family, and old friends. Monroe, and through her Carlotta, is sassy, empathetic, and inspired even when dealing with memories of her time in prison, surrounded by men, and her current difficulty of needing to cash a check without an actual bank account. F.M.R.G. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
When Carlotta Mercedes is paroled after 20 years and four parole board rejections, she finally gets to live her life as the woman she is instead of the man who went to prison. Author James Hannaham narrates the third-person elements of his novel in a straightforward manner. His performance gets a boost from trans comedian Flame Monroe as Carlotta, whose ruminations, expectations, recriminations, and, most of all, sharp observations are given voice as she rediscovers Brooklyn, family, and old friends. Monroe, and through her Carlotta, is sassy, empathetic, and inspired even when dealing with memories of her time in prison, surrounded by men, and her current difficulty of needing to cash a check without an actual bank account. F.M.R.G. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
★ 2022-06-08
A trans woman returns home after spending half her life in a men’s prison. She has a lot to say.
The title character of Hannaham’s superb third novel is a Black Colombian woman who’s just been paroled after spending nearly 22 years in prison. She was an accomplice in her cousin’s robbery of a Brooklyn liquor store that led to a shopkeeper’s murder; she transitioned during her incarceration, leading to routine abuses by inmates and correctional officers, including serial rape in solitary confinement. Upon her release, though, her demeanor is undefeated and stubbornly irrepressible: Hannaham often starts paragraphs with omniscient third-person descriptions followed by abrupt, unpunctuated interruptions by Carlotta. (“Carlotta turned on her heel and rushed back to the subway Yo this shit’s too much a too much!”) It’s an effective rhetorical technique, showing her urge to take control of the narrative while counteracting the kinds of “official” narratives that get the story wrong about women like her. It also simply makes Carlotta’s story engrossing reading. Carlotta’s travels through Fort Greene, Brooklyn, during the day or so the novel tracks are only moderately eventful—finding her parole officer, applying for a job, visiting family, attempting to drive a car, attending a wake—but all of it is enlivened with her commentary. Much of her sass is a survival instinct—eventually we learn just how traumatized she is, and she’s enduring what proves to be a difficult reentry into society. In parts the book reads like a time-travel story, as Carlotta observes changes in technology, manners, and her old stomping grounds. And in its day-in-the-life framing, hyperlocality, and rhetorical invention, it’s also an homage to Ulysses, whose ending is flagrantly echoed here. Carlotta deserves a lot of things society rarely provides to women like her—among them, a role in great fiction. Hannaham gives Carlotta her due.
A brash, ambitious novel carried by an unforgettable narrator.
