LOT Stories by BRYAN WASHINGTON
Hardback published by Atlantic Books
In an apartment block in the city of Houston, the son of a black mother and a Latino father is coming of age. He’s working at his family restaurant, trying to dodge his brother’s fists and resenting his older sister’s absence. He also discovering he likes boys.
All around him his friends and neighbours experience the tumult of living in the margins, the heartbreak of ghosts and the braveries of the human heart. The stories of others living, thriving and dying across the city’s myriad neighbourhoods are switched throughout the boy’s life to reveal a young woman caught out in an affair, the fortunes of a rag-tag baseball team and a group of young hustlers, the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, a local drug dealer who takes a Guatemalan teen under his wing, and the fate of a camera-shy mythical beast.
Bryan Washington’s brilliant, viscerally drawn world leaps off the page with engery, wit and the infinite longing of people searching for home. With soulful insight into what makes a community, a family and a life, Lot is about love in all it’s unsparing and insteady forms.
My review
Lot by Bryan Washington, is a short story collection that centres in the city of Huston. I found it very well written. It’s a raw read, with coming of age, drugs and race, and being unfaithful. The scene is set well, in an apartment block in the city of Huston, the son of a black mother and a Latino father.
The passage that I found raw and heartbreaking.
For a while our father kept this other woman in the Heights. It was tough luck seeing him most nights at best. He’d snatch at his keys from the kitchen counter, nod to all of us at once, spit something about how he had business to handle, and of course he never thought to tell us what it could be but we figured it out.
About author Bryan Washington
Bryan has written for the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, New York Magazine, BuzzFeed, The Paris Review, Boston Review, Tin House, One Story, GQ, FADER, The Awl and Catapult. He lives in Huston, Texas.
You can find Bryan Washington on
Twitter@brywashing
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