Lot: Stories by Bryan Washington

In the city of Houston - a sprawling, diverse microcosm of America - the son of a black mother and a Latino father is coming of age. He's working at his family's restaurant, weathering his brother's blows, resenting his older sister's absence. And discovering he likes boys.

Around him, others live and thrive and die in Houston's myriad neighborhoods: a young woman whose affair detonates across an apartment complex, a ragtag baseball team, a group of young hustlers, hurricane survivors, a local drug dealer who takes a Guatemalan teen under his wing, a reluctant chupacabra.

Bryan Washington's brilliant, viscerally drawn world vibrates with energy, wit, raw power, and the infinite longing of people searching for home. With soulful insight into what makes a community, a family, and a life, Lot explores trust and love in all its unsparing and unsteady forms.

Un ensemble d'histoires assez courtes sur la vie au sein d'un lotissement afro-américain et le fait de grandir en se découvrant homosexuel. Aucun misérabilisme, juste le réel dans toute sa diversité. J'ai beaucoup aimé la galerie de personnages que l'on croise, les vies qui se nouent et se dénouent ainsi que le regard de l'auteur sur ces moments de vie assez unique. Certains passages sont durs à suivre car écrits comme un flux de pensée, mais dans l'ensemble j'ai assez aimé ce recueil.

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A collection of fairly short stories about life in an African-American lot and growing up discovering oneself as a gay man. No miserabilism, just reality in all its diversity. I really liked the gallery of characters that we meet, the lives that are tied up and untied as well as the author's view of these unique moments in life. Some parts are hard to follow because they are written as a flow of thoughts, but overall I enjoyed this collection.

These stories were vibrant, gritty, heartbreaking, and EXCEPTIONALLY well written. Washington writes such diverse voices with such a wonderful familiarity. This depiction of growing up queer and non-white in Texas was a hit, and I was extremely impressed by the writing here.

Probably closer to a 4 star in actuality, but I was SO excited for this book and I have never been so convinced that I needed to read something immediately. It's a series of short stories about living in Houston and growing up black and coming out and dealing with immigration and gentrification, by a guy from Houston, and all the stories are named after suburbs and streets and neighborhoods of Houston.

This book made me so homesick for Texas, and I never even lived in Houston (the closest I lived was two hours west, in College Station, while Matt was in grad school). Kolaches and Whataburger and drinking Shiner. Harvey and Rita. The Galleria, Minute Maid Park, Rice, Katz's. But this stuff is never more than a reference; you know it or you don't, and I worry that this is going to be a turnoff for some people, that there's no further explanation. It breathes Texas. One of the reasons I loved it.

It's a somewhat dark collection. Not especially hopeful. A slice of life for most of the people in the stories, though half the stories are interconnected with the same characters and from the same point of view. Not all of these stories and these lives were familiar to me, and it was a beautiful read.