Nina Revoyr - Wingshooters

More Critical Praise for Nina Revoyr

for Southland

A Los Angeles Times Best Seller

Selected for the Los Angeles Times Best Books of 2003 list

Winner: Lambda Literary Award

Winner: Ferro-Grumley Literary Award

Winner: American Library Associations Stonewall Honor Award

Finalist: Edgar Award

A Book Sense 76 Pick

Selected for the InsightOut Book Club

The plot line of Southland is the stuff of a James Ellroy or a Walter Mosley novel But the climax fairly glows with the good-heartedness that Revoyr displays from the very first page.

Los Angeles Times

Compelling never lacking in vivid detail and authentic atmosphere, the novel cements Revoyrs reputation as one of the freshest young chroniclers of life in L.A.

Publishers Weekly

If Oprah still had her book club, this novel likely would be at the top of her list With prose that is beautiful, precise, but never pretentious

Booklist (starred review)

[A]n ambitious and absorbing book that works on many levels: as a social and political history of Los Angeles, as the story of a young woman discovering and coming to terms with her cultural heritage, as a multigenerational and multiracial family saga, and as a solid detective story.

Denver Post

Nina Revoyr gives us her Los Angeles, a loved version of that often fabled landscape. Her people are as reticent and careful as any under siege, but she sifts their stories out of the dust of neighborhoods, police reports, and family legend. The storiesblack, white, Asian, and multiracialintertwine in unexpected and deeply satisfying ways. Read this book and tell me you dont want to read more. I know I do.

Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard Out of Carolina

Subtle, effective [with] a satisfyingly unpredictable climax.

Washington Post

Fascinating and heartbreaking an essential part of L.A. history.

LA Weekly

An engaging, thoughtful book that even East Coasters can enjoy.

New York Press

A remarkable feat Revoyrs novel is honest in detailing Southern Californias brutal history, and honorable in showing how families survived with love and tenacity and dignity.

Susan Straight, author of A Million Nightingales

Dead-on descriptions of California both gritty and golden.

East Bay Express

Southland gripped my attention and would not let go until I turned the last page.

International Examiner

Southland is a simmering stew of individual dreams, family struggles, cultural relations, social changes, and race relations. It is a compelling, challenging, and rewarding novel.

Chicago Free Press

for The Age of Dreaming

Finalist: Los Angeles Times Book Prize

* Top Five Books of 2008: The Advocate

Rare indeed is a novel this deeply pleasurable and significant.

Booklist (starred review)

[Revoyr] is fast becoming one of the citys finest chroniclers and mythmakers.

Los Angeles Magazine

Reminiscent of Paul Austers The Book of Illusions in its concoction of spurious Hollywood history and its stars filmography Ingenious hums with the excitement of Hollywoods pioneer era.

San Francisco Chronicle

Fast-moving, riveting, unpredictable, and profound; highly recommended.

Library Journal

Revoyr beautifully invokes Juns self-deceptions and his growing self-awareness. Its an enormously satisfying novel.

Publishers Weekly

Revoyr conveys in a lucid, precise and period appropriate prose a pulse-quickening, deliciously ironic serving of Hollywood noir.

Kirkus Reviews

[Nina Revoyr is] an empathetic chronicler of the dispossessed outsider in L.A.

Los Angeles Times

Quietly powerful settles to a close as deftly and beautifully as a crane landing on quiet water.

LA Weekly

Revoyr resurrects the old old Hollywood, from the time before talkies, and dreams it into existence once again.

Bookforum

Five stars.

Time Out Chicago

for The Necessary Hunger

The Necessary Hunger is the kind of irresistible read you start on the subway at 6 p.m. on the way home from work and keep plowing through until youve turned the last page It beats with the pulse of life

Time

Quietly intimate, vigorously honest, and uniquely American Tough and tender without a single false note.

Kirkus Reviews

Revoyr triumphs in blending many complex issues, including urban poverty and violence, adolescent sexuality, and the vitality of basketball, without losing sight of her characters. She creates a family, in all senses of the word, of characters who are complex, admirable, and aggravating; readers will root for them on and off the court.

Detroit Free Press

Revoyr focuses on a number of issues, including competition, interracial relationships, and same-sex relationships A thoughtful work

Library Journal

A wholesome coming-of-age novel about two high school basketball stars, Revoyrs debut is a meditation on consuming passion and a reflection on lost opportunities The basketball action, which builds climactically, honors the split-second timing and excitement of the game. Revoyr also evokes the feel of contemporary L.A., capturing crack-heads, gang-bangers, and car-jackings in sharp, street-smart dialogue.

Publishers Weekly

Revoyr has unerringly caught the angst of teenagers, as well as the rarified, self-involved world in which they live A sympathetic, tender rendering of the frustration of unrequited love.

Cleveland Plain Dealer

This book may in fact contain the most loving prose well see on basketball until John Edgar Wideman writes about his daughter Jamila, the gifted point guard for Stanford.

Chicago Tribune

This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the authors imagination. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Published by Akashic Books

2011 by Nina Revoyr

ePub ISBN-13: 978-1-617-75018-2
Hardcover ISBN-13: 978-1-936070-86-2

Hardcover Library of Congress Control Number: 2010928792

Paperback ISBN-13: 978-1-936070-71-8

Paperback Library of Congress Control Number: 2010922723

Akashic Books

PO Box 1456

New York, NY 10009

info@akashicbooks.com

www.akashicbooks.com

For Johnny Temple and Johanna Ingalls

TABLE OF CONTENTS

How we fall into grace. You cant work or earn your way into it.

You just fall. It lies below, it lies beyond. It comes to you, unbidden.

Rick Bass, Colter

I would burn soles of my feet

Burn the palms of both my hands

If I could learn and be complete

If I could walk righteously again

Lucinda Williams, Get Right with God

I n my apartment in California there hangs a picture of my grandfather. He is one of twelve men dressed in off-white baseball uniforms and plain dark caps, all seated in front of a boy in a baggy black suit. The men sit cross-legged or rest on one knee; their bats lean together like logs on a camp fire, surrounded by their gloves. Behind them stand two large, boxy cars with a banner draped between them that reads, Buick Ball Club, Deerhorn Wisconsin . Although the picture is posed, there is something about the quality of the players postures and smiles that makes it seem like they just collapsed there, giddy and tired, and someone happened to capture the moment. The uniforms have a softer look than what ballplayers wear todaythe caps are rounder and more pliable, the pants and jerseys looser, the gloves amorphous and lumpybut the men look more like men. My grandfather, sitting in the lower right-hand corner, smiles at the camera from out of his open, handsome face as if he knows hell live forever. The license plate on one of the Buicks has tags from 1925, and if the date is accurate, then my grandfather, Charlie LeBeau, is nineteen. Because of the cap, the usual shock of slicked-back hair that falls over his eyes, making him look playful and roguish, is held still. But even so, he is beautiful, and knows it. Farther back in the picture, a young woman leans out the window of another car, resting her chin in her hand, and I imagine she is staring at Charlie. Everyone, for all of his life, always stared at Charlie.

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