SALE ON NOW! PROMOTIONS
James Hannaham was born in the Bronx, grew up in Yonkers, New York, and now lives in Brooklyn. His most recent novel, Delicious Foods, won the PEN/Faulkner and Hurston/Wright Legacy Awards. His novel God Says No was honored by the ALA's Stonewall Book Awards. His short stories have been in One Story, Fence, Story Quarterly, BOMB; he was for many years a writer for the Village Voice and Salon and is also a visual and performance artist. He has exhibited text-based visual art at The Center for Emerging Visual Artists, 490 Atlantic, and James Cohan. He won Best in Show for the exhibition Biblio Spectaculum at Main Street Arts. He teaches at the Pratt Institute.
A funny and compelling meditation on the self and knowledge, authenticity and identity, mortality and chance, Pilot Impostor unfolds in tragic and comic fragments, allusions, and inventions. Unexpected-also beautiful. -Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer, The Refugees, and The Committed A captivating blend of prose and verse . . . Hannaham's stimulating work moves like a plane in tailspin, tossing off flashes of wisdom as the ground below gets ever closer. It's a ride worth taking. -Publishers Weekly A wild symphony of language, image, and philosophico-political outrage, James Hannaham's Pilot Impostor is a gift to the genre-curious and Genius-averse: gorgeous, brutal, funny, intimate, enraging, cathartic, anti-cathartic, romantic (small-r), and deliriously, entirely itself. -Anna Moschovakis, International Booker Prize-winning translator and poet Pilot Impostor takes us on an exhilarating, incandescent ride. Words crash, meanings disintegrate and reincarnate, histories disappear and appear on the radar, and against all odds the pilot knows exactly where we're headed. As Juliane Diller, the lone survivor of the 1971 crash of Lockheed L-188A Electra turboprop, once described the paradox: 'I hadn't left the plane; the plane had left me.' -Monique Truong, author of The Sweetest Fruits and The Book of Salt Micro essays, flash fictions, prose poems: however you choose to label James Hannaham's rebuses of posture and imposture, self and anti-self, they are endlessly inventive, thought-provoking, and delightful. Mixing text and image, playfulness and profundity, Pilot Impostor updates the flight manual of shape-shifting twentieth-century masters-Calvino, Borges, Perec-and most of all Fernando Pessoa, poetic champion of identity theft. 'So too in my soul do aircraft vanish'-well now, that's the type of pilot we've been looking for! -Campbell McGrath, author of Nouns & Verbs: New and Selected Poems
