Adam Mansbach

Adam Mansbach's most recent book is the critically-acclaimed bestseller Angry Black White Boy, or The Miscegenation of Macon Detornay, a satire about race, whiteness and hip hop that has already found its way onto numerous college and high school curricula. The author of two previous books, the novel Shackling Water and the poetry collection genius b-boy cynics getting weeded in the garden of delights, Mansbach is the founding editor of the pioneering '90s hip hop journal Elementary, an Artistic Consultant to Columbia University's Center for Jazz Studies, and a contributor to publications including The Boston Globe, The San Francisco Chronicle, JazzTimes and Wax Poetics. A hip hop artist whose debut album, Stand for Nothing, Fall for Anything, was recently released by Upshot Records, Mansbach is a frequent public lecturer on race, hip hop, literature, and popular culture. His recent appearances include Brown University, Columbia University, and The University of California at Berkeley, The University of Wisconsin at Madison, San Francisco State, The New School, The Harlem Book Fair, The Boston Globe Book Fair, The Living Word Festival, and Alameda Juvenile Hall. He is currently at work on a third novel, The End of the Jews, and is co-editing, with T Cooper, A Fictional History of the United States With Huge Chunks Missing, an anthology of original short stories to be published in August 2006. He lives in Berkeley, California.<h4>PRAISE FOR ANGRY BLACK WHITE BOY</h4>"Angry Black White Boy gives new meaning to the term black humor. A singularly jittery blend of urban wit and southern Gothic, it's a book of buoyant rhythm and dark material. A novel of ideas above all... The book covers expansive intellectual and geographical terrain, [and] its drive never falters. Mansbach gets us there by creating a tense world whose figures often are at cross-purposes. Angry Black White Boy, like the truest expressions of hip-hop, graffiti and jazz, is daring and original. It stings like its hero, Macon Detornay, a self-described scorpion of race."-- The Boston Globe"A remarkably successful remix of the traditional race novel. Mansbach monkey-wrenches the formula of the angry black man in the white man's world and incisively cuts to the heart of the issue of race in America today. [Angry Black White Boy] shows us where we as a culture have come from, the distance we have traveled, and how long the road ahead remains. It is first-rate satire grounded in the absurd notion that a simple 'I'm sorry' can start to make things better. The novel will make you laugh, cringe and read until the last page without knowing how it's going to end. It is difficult to imagine a more appropriate conclusion for the story of Macon Detornay, as the uncertainty of fiction dovetails with the uncertainty of reality."-- The San Francisco Chronicle"Mansbach is an able satirist of race issues captures vividly the inhuman sadism inherent to racial violence."-- The New York Times Book Review