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.