Vengeance. Zachary Lazar

Vengeance is an artful, compulsively readable blend of autofiction, reportage, social commentary, and mystery writing. Readers are immediately swept up by the novel’s central question, “Is Kendrick King guilty?” even as the narrator keeps us in tune with the ironies, injustices, histories, and fractured points of view impacting the answer to this question Set in Louisiana’s Angola prison, this resonant and timely novel explores issues of race and class in the American judicial system, the often slippery labels of guilt and innocence, and the reporter’s power (and privilege) to cast light upon facts and human stories Excellent blurbs in hand from Sarah Koenig, host/executive producer of the acclaimed podcast Serial , Kiese Laymon, and Joshua Ferris ( To Rise Again at a Decent Hour ) Vengeance draws its subject matter from fiction and real life. As James Wood noted in The New Yorker of Lazar’s last novel, I Pity the Poor Immigrant , the author has an unsurpassed talent at crafting “singular narratives out of diverse sources.” Zachary really did spend time (nights and days) in Angola interviewing prisoners, but this is a novel. Author lives and works during the academic year in New Orleans, LA, where he teaches at Tulane. He is available for bookstore, library, and campus visits The author will attend SIBA, with ARCs available at the Fall 2017 annual show, as well as librarians at ALA Midwinter Louisiana’s judicial system (highest rate of incarceration anywhere in the world) and Angola prison in particular have been in the news a lot frequently; NPR ran an April 2017 story on the state’s short-staffed public defenders’ offices; The New Yorker ran a January 2017 profile on Albert Woodfax, the man who served the longest solitary confinement sentence in the prison’s history Angola Prison is 18,000 acres (larger than Manhattan) and has 6300 inmates. They have a radio station, a newspaper, and a television station "Despite the words «A Novel» on the cover, I found myself struggling to think of Vengeance as anything but true. In part, that's by design: the main character is a journalist named Zachary Lazar who meets an inmate at the notorious plantation-style Angola Prison in Louisiana and decides to look into his claims of innocence. But it's also a tribute to the humble, detailed brilliance of the novelist's work in portraying both his character and the lives of those he investigates. His true-or-not-true style becomes a way of reckoning with the difficult, ambivalent work of paying witness in a society organized around punishment and race. True or not, it's a quietly stunning work of fiction." —Tom Nissley, Phinney Books, Seattle, WA