Synopses & Reviews
From the author of the widely praised
Class A — a memoir that investigates the life and death of his enigmatic brother, who died of a heroin overdose, and compels him to redefine his own place in a family whose narrative is bisected by the tragic loss.
Lucas Mann's brother, Josh, died of a heroin overdose when Lucas was only thirteen years old. Charismatic, ambitious, cruel and sadistic, violent and vulnerable, Josh's brief life was ultimately unknowable. Yet, Josh is both a presence and absence in the author's life that will not remain unclaimed. Told in kaleidoscopic shards of memories assembled from interviews with Josh's friends and family and the raw material of the Josh's own journals, a revealing, startling portrait unfolds. At the same time, Mann pulls back to question and examine his own complicated feelings about and motives for recovering memories of his brother's life, searching for a balance between the tension of the inevitability of Josh's life and the "what-ifs" that beg to be asked. Unstinting in its honesty and profound in its conclusions, Lord Fear more than confirms the promise of Mann's earlier book; with it, he is poised to enter the ranks of the best young writers of his generation.
Review
“Like the best memoirs, Lord Fear isn’t really about its author’s life: it’s about his brother, Josh, an addict who died young, and the ways we mythologize and grieve a loss like that. This book is generous, unsentimental, often funny, and always smart; Mann has a striking ability to wring meaning from each moment. To sum it up with something I wrote in the margins: Damn, he can write.” Justin St. Germain, author of Son of a Gun
Review
“Lord Fear is a hard book—as it should be, as its subject (a brother’s fatal overdose) is hard; reconstructing the life and death of an other is hard; families are hard; masculinity edging into misogyny is hard; addiction is hard; remembering is hard; grief is hard. Lucas Mann heads straight into these thickets armed with an uncommon emotional intelligence and the capacity to hold great mysteries, fears, horrors, and sorrows in taut, gripping sentences. This is a moving, frightening, expertly written book that stands at the nexus of imagination, encounter, document, and dirge.” Maggie Nelson, author of The Art of Cruelty
Review
“This book is achingly tender, violent, bittersweet, and bold. Lucas Mann has told the story of his brother in so unpredictable and enthralling a way that he has opened up the story of memory itself wide enough for a new kind of memoir to emerge.” John D’Agata, author of About a Mountain
About the Author
LUCAS MANN was born in New York City and received his MFA from the University of Iowa, where he was the Provost's Visiting Writer in Nonfiction. He is the author of Class A: Baseball in the Middle of Everywhere, and his essays and stories have appeared in numerous publications, including Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, and The Kenyon Review. He teaches writing at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth and lives in Providence, Rhode Island.
Lucas Mann on PowellsBooks.Blog
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