Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} The Ecstatic by Victor LaValle The Ecstatic. Anthony James weighs 315 pounds, is possibly schizophrenic, and he’s just been kicked out of college. He’s rescued by his mother, sister, and grandmother, but they may not be altogether sane themselves. Living in the basement of their home in Queens, New York, Anthony is armed with nothing but wicked sarcasm and a few well-cut suits. He intends to make horror movies but takes the jobs he can handle, cleaning homes and factories, and keeps crossing paths with a Japanese political prisoner, a mysterious loan shark named Ishkabibble, and packs of feral dogs. When his invincible 13-year old sister enters yet another beauty pageant—this one for virgins—the combustible Jameses pile into their car and head South for the competition. Will Anthony’s family stick together or explode? With electrifying prose, LaValle ushers us into four troubled but very funny lives. From the Back Cover: “A compassionate mystery of madness . . . gritty and funny, both smart-alecky and dark.” — Los Angeles Times. “Bristles with visionary energy.” — Vanity Fair. “One of our most talented young writers.” —Charles Baxter. “His characters remind one of Chester Himes and Charles Wright, but LaValle is special.” —Ishmael Reed. Proves that Victor LaValle is a voice to be reckoned with for years to come.” —Ernesto Quiñonez, author of Bodega Dreams. “[The] characters are as beautifully rendered as they are bizarrely believable. . . . LaValle . . . writes prose that hums in your ear and appeals to your intellect.” — The Washington Post Book World. The Ecstatic by Victor LaValle. History (featuring Talib Kweli) Mos Def’s fourth studio album. Release date: June 9, 2009. The Ecstatic is the fourth studio album by Mos Def. After venturing further away from Hip Hop with an acting career and two poorly received albums, Mos Def signed with Downtown Records and recorded The Ecstatic primarily at the Record Plant in Los Angeles. He worked with producers such as Preservation, Mr. Flash, Oh No, and Madlib, the latter two of whom re-used instrumentals they had produced on Stones Throw Records. Singer Georgia Anne Muldrow, formerly of the record label, was one of the album’s few guest vocalists, along with rappers Slick Rick and Talib Kweli. For its front cover, a still from Charles Burnett’s 1978 film Killer of Sheep was reproduced in red tint. The Ecstatic was described by music journalists as a conscious and alternative Hip Hop record with an eccentric, internationalist quality. Mos Def’s raps about global politics, love, spirituality, and social conditions were informed by the zeitgeist of the late 2000s, Black internationalism, and Pan-Islamic ideas, as he incorporated a number of Islamic references throughout the album. Its loosely structured, lightly reverbed songs used unconventional time signatures and samples taken from a variety of international musical styles, including Afrobeat, soul, Eurodance, jazz, reggae, Latin, and Middle Eastern music. Mos Def titled The Ecstatic after one of his favorite novels—the 2002 Victor LaValle book of the same name— believing its titular phrase evoked his singular creative vision for the album. Released on June 9, 2009, The Ecstatic charted at number nine on the Billboard 200 and eventually sold 168,000 copies. Its sales benefited from its presence on Internet blogs and the release of a T-shirt illustrating the record’s packaging alongside a label printed with a code redeemable for a free download of the album. A widespread critical success, The Ecstatic was viewed as a return to form for Mos Def and one of the year’s best albums. He embarked on an international tour to support the record, performing concerts in North America, Japan, Australia, and the United Kingdom between September and April 2010. While touring with him as his DJ, Preservation began to develop remixes of the album’s songs, which he later released on the remix album The REcstatic in 2013. (Wikipedia) Incredibly Hulky. THE summer before his senior year of college, Victor LaValle recalled in a recent essay on Nerve.com, he weighed 350 pounds. ''I couldn't get a date, but I couldn't be quite sure how unattractive I'd become. I was still friendly, I made jokes and, in my mind, if I saw a woman smiling at me . . . I still had a chance. I did not.'' In ''The Ecstatic,'' his first novel, LaValle appears to have envisioned the larger-than-life character he might have become. Its protagonist is a huge and hapless 23-year-old named Anthony, whose childhood and adolescence were recounted in a group of stories in LaValle's often brutal debut collection, ''Slapboxing With Jesus'' (1999). ''The Ecstatic'' finds Anthony, a Cornell dropout suffering from bouts of dementia, newly in the care of his grandmother, mother and younger sister in the Rosedale neighborhood of Queens. The novel unwinds as a psychological horror story depicting the particulars of this black man-child's difficult life. Anthony's paranoid schizophrenia is attributed to heredity -- his mom was institutionalized after tobogganing naked through Flushing Meadow Park -- and at first he seems relatively harmless, with obsessions that include cleaning and horror movies. We gradually realize, however, that his primary symptom is an alarming fixation on the sexuality of his religious 13-year-old sister, Nabisase. This impressionistic novel's plot, such as it is, hinges on the family's trip south to Lumpkin, Va., the resonant location of the Miss Innocence pageant for chaste girls, which Nabisase has entered. At a rest stop the family encounters the freelance protest group Pretty Damn Mad, whose members will be hired by the diminutive Uncle Arms, a descendant of black aristocrats, to disrupt the pageant. (Uncle Arms wants to bolster his own pageant, whose winners are predicated on the amount of misery they have sustained.) As with many contemporary horror stories, the theme here is the sacred versus the profane, particularly where women are concerned. Anthony's single sexual encounter, with an overweight college student he meets on the subway, is a confused mixture of love and loathing. ''To me women were like the perfect model of government,'' he declares, ''paving the roads and protecting the weak. Omnipotent. Boys without fathers say that kind of thing a lot. . . . Comparing ladies to goddesses and gold. But still I think we hate women even more than the average guy.'' Anthony's interior monologues, which are easily the book's most rewarding passages, remain lucid while his behavior becomes ever more erratic -- notably a disturbing scene in which he imagines his sister fellating a fellow fat man in a movie theater. ANTHONY'S delusions, unmediated by medication, intensify. A loan shark collects Anthony's recollections of every horror movie he has ever seen, or possibly fantasized, into a vanity-press volume titled ''Killing Is My Business,'' which Anthony peddles door to door. The book becomes his ''talisman'' as his world becomes increasingly hallucinatory. Reality and fantasy eventually blend together into a megalomaniacal vortex with a raving Anthony -- trapped by race, size, gender and brain chemistry -- at its center. ''The Ecstatic'' is a valiant, if not entirely successful, attempt by LaValle to update the boy he introduced three years ago. Where the stories in ''Slapboxing With Jesus'' bristled with the energy of dire hip-hop singles, ''The Ecstatic'' lapses into long, torpid subplots -- such as the extended Uncle Arms-Pretty Damn Mad episode, or Anthony's obsession with an imprisoned activist based on Mumia Abu-Jamal. Back home in Queens, though, Anthony feels as familiar as that large, fragrant man everyone avoids on the subway but whom Victor LaValle -- who now appears, based on his photograph on this novel's dust jacket, to be rather thin -- is empathetic enough to portray with strangely moving affection as a giddy, doomed ''Maxi Me.'' News - Items. The Changeling When Apollo Kagwa's father disappeared, all he left his son were strange recurring dreams and a box of books stamped with the word IMPROBABILIA. Now Apollo is a father himself—and as he and his wife, Emma, are settling into their new lives as parents, exhaustion and anxiety start to take their toll. Apollo's old dreams return and Emma begins acting odd. Irritable and disconnected from their new baby boy, at first Emma seems to be exhibiting signs of postpartum depression, but it quickly becomes clear that her troubles go even deeper. Before Apollo can do anything to help, Emma commits a horrific act—beyond any parent's comprehension—and vanishes, seemingly into thin air. Thus begins Apollo's odyssey through a world he only thought he understood, to find a wife and child who are nothing like he'd imagined. His quest, which begins when he meets a mysterious stranger who claims to have information about Emma's whereabouts, takes him to a forgotten island, a graveyard full of secrets, a forest where immigrant legends still live, and finally back to a place he thought he had lost forever. This captivating retelling of a classic fairy tale imaginatively explores parental obsession, spousal love, and the secrets that make strangers out of the people we love the most. It's a thrilling and emotionally devastating journey through the gruesome legacies that threaten to devour us and the homely, messy magic that saves us, if we're lucky. Background image @ Andrew Tonn. The Devil in Silver Pepper is a rambunctious big man, minor-league troublemaker, working-class hero (in his own mind), and, suddenly, the surprised inmate of a budget-strapped mental institution in Queens, New York. He's not mentally ill, but that doesn't seem to matter. He is accused of a crime he can't quite square with his memory. In the darkness of his room on his first night, he's visited by a terrifying creature with the body of an old man and the head of a bison who nearly kills him before being hustled away by the hospital staff. It's no delusion: The other patients confirm that a hungry devil roams the hallways when the sun goes down. Pepper rallies three other inmates in a plot to fight back: Dorry, an octogenarian schizophrenic who's been on the ward for decades and knows all its secrets; Coffee, an African immigrant with severe OCD, who tries desperately to send alarms to the outside world; and Loochie, a bipolar teenage girl who acts as the group's enforcer. Battling the pill-pushing staff, one another, and their own minds, they try to kill the monster that's stalking them. But can the Devil die? The Devil in Silver brilliantly brings together the compelling themes that spark all of Victor LaValle's radiant fiction: faith, race, class, madness, and our relationship with the unseen and the uncanny. More than that, it's a thrillingly suspenseful work of literary horror about friendship, love, and the courage to slay our own demons. NPR Interview In Victor LaValle's new novel, The Devil in Silver, a man is mistakenly committed to a mental hospital where a buffalo-headed monster stalks patients at night. Background Image © Shaun O'Boyle. Big Machine Ricky Rice is a middle-aged hustler with a lingering junk habit, a bum knee, and a haunted mind. The sole survivor of a suicide cult, he spends his days scraping by as a porter at a bus depot in Utica, New York. Until one day a letter arrives, reminding him of a vow he once made and summoning him to Vermont's remote Northeast Kingdom to fulfill it. There, Ricky is inducted into a band of paranormal investigators comprised of former addicts and petty criminals, all of whom have at some point in their wasted lives heard the Voice: a murmur on the wind, a disembodied shout, a whisper in an empty room. All these may or may not have been messages from God. Their mission is to find the Voice—and figure out what it wants. Big Machine takes us from Ricky's childhood in a matrilineal cult housed in a New York City tenement to his near-death experience in the basement of an Iowa house owned by a man named Murder. And to his final confrontation with an army of true believers—and with his own past. Infused with the wonder of a disquieting dream and laced with Victor LaValle's fiendish comic sensibility, Big Machine is a mind-rattling mystery about doubt, faith, and the monsters we carry within us. "If Hieronymus Bosch and Lenny Bruce got knocked up by a woman with a large and compassionate heart, they might have brought forth Big Machine. But it is Victor LaValle's peculiar, poetic, rough and funny voice that brings it to us, alive and kicking and irresistible." —Amy Bloom. NPR Interview Man, A Latrine, A Bus Station And A Promise "These are the opening elements of Victor Lavalle's new novel, Big Machine. The protagonist has a problem, but what's a man got to worry about if he's mopping floors for Trailways in Utica, New York? Guest host Jacki Lyden talks to LaValle, who some say writes like Thomas Pynchon, others like Ralph Ellison." 'The Ecstatic' They drove a green rented car into central New York State to find me living wild in my apartment. Wearing shattered glasses and my hair a giant cauliflower-shaped afro on my head. I was three hundred and fifteen pounds. I was a mess, but the house was clean. They knocked and when I opened the front door there were three archangels on my stoop. My sister rubbed my ear when I cried. She whispered, -Why don't you go put on clothes? My family took me home to Queens and kept me in the basement. When I tried to go outside alone, they discouraged it. My sister led me by the hand when walking to the supermarket. Mom cut my meat at the dinner table. They treated me like what some still refer to as a Mongoloid. A few days of this is tenderness, but two weeks seems more like punishment. The spirit of blame stooped in a corner. Their concern was wonderful, but the condescension was deadly. And surprising. Before opening the front door to them I really thought my life was full of pepper. Three weeks after coming back to Rosedale I cooked a big, red breakfast for my family just to prove that I could. Not only to them, but to myself. It was September 25th, 1995. I remember certain dates to organize and understand my disaster. Without them my mind is a mass grave. It was a red breakfast because I added ketchup to the eggs when scrambling them. And to the bacon as it curled in the pan. Call me tasteless, but ketchup is the only seasoning I need. I was so nervous that I even dressed up that morning. This bright purple suit that was loose on me and hid my tits. Made me look like a two- hundred-fifty-pound man. Our oven was so hot I had to watch I didn't sweat into the food. Wiped my forehead with my tie. I pulled butter from the fridge to set next to a plate of toast and if this didn't make them happy then I was out of ideas. But they didn't appear. I waited a long time. Even though I heard their beds creak then footsteps on the floor, they never came around the corner. It was like they turned to dust. I prodded the bacon, but without enthusiasm. There was no sizzle yet. With my left hand in my pants pocket I hoped to look cool. I counted numbers to keep from fidgeting. I turned the gas flames lower. I washed dishes left in the sink overnight and put them in high cabinets. Sunlight addressed the windows. Worst of all fears is abandonment. Eventually I had to know where they'd gone. The white linoleum tiles ticked against the undersides of my dress shoes. I was silent in the hallway. There weren't any windows here so the place was dark and the ceiling seemed far. My hands tapping the walls was the echo inside a hollow bomb. They'd hid in the bathroom. Mom leaned against the sink while Grandma rested on the toilet and my sister, Nabisase, sat on the rim of the tub. Three versions of the same woman-past, present and future-huddled in one room. With the door partway shut I was unseen and apart from them. Mom whispered, -We should go to him. -Yes. Grandma agreed, but they stayed there. My family was afraid of me. I expected more sympathy, actually, because I sure wasn't the first one in my bloodline to go zipper-lidded. You should've seen when my mother tobogganed naked through Flushing Meadow Park in 1983. Four police carried her to the hospital wrapped in their jackets. Parents on the hill thought Mom was a hump-starved fiend out to abduct their children. Her illness often made her frenzied sexually. Whenever she relapsed the woman was an open-womb, but Haldol had stabilized Mom's mind for years. There was my Uncle Isaac, too, who walked from New York to the Canadian border in 1986, and emptied out his brain pan with a rifle. So when they discovered me in that Ithaca apartment Mom and Grandma recognized the situation. Their boy had become a narwhal. I pushed in the bathroom door to surprise them, but instead of shuddering they only sighed. -Good morning, Grandma murmured. Nabisase smiled. -That's very good of you! She was confused and angry. She was thirteen and thus only partially human when it came to compassion. Call me her older brother, by ten years, but Nabisase practically had to tie me down to cut my hair that first week back. I kept saying that I looked fine. No kid is going to enjoy that. Sarcasm was her mild revenge. Mom and Grandma were earnestly complimentary; anything I did earned praise. If I'd taken an especially heavy boweling they would have bought me a squeeze toy. Nabisase asked, -Is the fire oven still on? -The place where you cook, Nabisase explained slowly. -It might be, I admitted. They ran past me. Forget that. Right over me. Even Grandma, a ninety-three year old, vaulted my doughy shoulders and sped into the kitchen. Where Mom was turning the burners' dials straight off, to six o'clock. -I wouldn't have started a fire, I told them. -How do you know? Nabisase asked. Neville Chamberlain believed Hitler would be satisfied to taste only a jigger of Czechoslovakia. My family knew I wasn't retarded, but the idea of one more paranoid schizophrenic in our fold fucked with their common sense so much that they never mentioned medication, hospitalization, examination. For what? They wished that I was fragile instead of berserk, so that's what I became. They handled me with cushy mitts. Grandma's English was slightly twisted. She was from East Africa. Uganda, specifically. My mother had also been born there, but Nabisase and I were from Queens. Grandma said, -Well we should have nice dresses then. Grandma said, -You are wearing a suit. We should put on long pants. While they changed I finished with the food. I got the frying pans going again; the smell of pig meat warmed my heart. The eggs were solid; not dry, just firm. So much grease on the skillet that they floated pretty as kids in a wading pool. I wasn't fat because of any thyroid condition. We lived in Rosedale, at the southeastern end of Queens. A suburb of New York complete with the growls of cars leaving driveways. The sound of engines was pleasant to me. Grandma came back first wearing a yellow housedress and black flat shoes. She walked down the hallway, into the liv-ing room, then sat on the sectional couch waiting to be served. Across the street a husband backed his RV into the yard of a home he shared with his wife. My family was middle class and I liked that. Then, loud as the Devil in his best pink shoes, my sister attacked my mother. A blitzkrieg; bomb blasts and shouting. Lightning behind Mom's bedroom door. My mother came down the hallway chased by her daughter, who was swinging a hair dryer and yelling Mom's name. Nabisase hammer-slammed Mom across the back of the skull and the dryer's nozzle shattered into plastic chips around the room. Nabisase took two handfuls of Mom's hair and used them as handles for pulling our mother, face first, to the ground. Grandma tried to stand, but the couch was shaking too much because Mom had pushed Nabisase backward across it. My mother might even have strangled Nabisase if my sister weren't scratching the skin from Mom's hands. Nabisase pulled the television from our gray entertainment unit. It would have made a louder crash but my mother's foot stopped the fall. Maybe a toe was broken. I bet my sister wished that was true. My mother had dabbled with art-dress making and sculpture to name two. The only proof of this was a horrendous statuette on top of our entertainment unit. A tiny bust meant to resemble Sidney Poitier except that both ears were on the same side of the poor man's head. With the television crashing the small bust wobbled about to fall so my mother set it safely on the floor. Then there was a broom against the wall, so Mom took it and gave Nabisase two baton shots in the ribs. This put my sister on the floor. And I was the one with a problem? Grandma yelled, -Anthony! Come. Anthony! Please. When I stood between my sister and mother they went around me. My sister threw couch cushions over my head hoping they'd hit Mom. Not to hurt, but to annoy, which was a fine alternative. Mom whipped a small picture frame under one of my outstretched arms and it plunked against a wall, chipping the paint. -I'm getting a lock for my bedroom, Mom promised. I'm getting it today. At which point Grandma raised her voice. The old lady climbed on the couch. -You crazy three bitches! she yelled. You stake my heart! She fell backward, but caught herself. The yellow housedress hung down between her thighs. With her spindly old arms and legs visible she became a giant wiry spider. Gnashing and screaming and the yellow fabric gathered below her like a dangling silk line. Loom of the dead. She scared us away. There really were worse situations than mine. Mothers and daughters are war. Not to seem monomaniacal, but there was still the matter of nine eggs, eight slices of toast, six pats of butter, four glasses of orange juice, two cups of tea, six sausage links and thirteen strips of bacon awaiting an eating. How could they forget that? My mother and Nabisase went to dress; passed the kitchen like there was no food inside. This is something I couldn't do. I didn't understand how my mother could. She used to be weak like me, but now I was the only one who felt the pantry calling. There are people who love to eat and those who don't. My mother might have changed, but I was still a man who found any complication less daunting after a full plate. Excerpted from The Ecstatic by Victor LaValle Copyright © 2002 by Victor LaValle. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.