The Occidental Book of the Dead A Novel

In Welcome to Braggsville, T. Geronimo Johnson has written a brilliant, blistering aria of an America divided by race, privilege, and politics. It's like a year's worth of The Daily Show compressed into a narrative that recent headlines have made even more heartbreakingly resonant. - Anthony Marra, New York Times bestselling author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena
"Stunning and poignant . . . Johnson's novel may not have the answer to the problems he's addressing, [but] it's clear that he's asking the right questions." - LA Review of Books
"Great American writers whose names came to mind as I was reading Welcome to Braggsville: Tom Wolfe, Mark Twain, Toni Morrison, H.L. Mencken, Don DeLillo, David Foster Wallace, Norman Mailer and Ralph Ellison. Johnson's timely novel is a tipsy social satire . . . a tour de force." - NPR's Fresh Air
Welcome to Braggsville is a comic, rollicking, and biting story about the cultural clash between the rural South and a bastion of contemporary politically sensitive liberalism." - Christian Science Monitor
"Full of virtuosic sentences and coruscating satire . . . a brilliant and necessary read." - Buzzfeed
"Johnson's writing is often brilliantly comic, and Braggsville is a welcome new kind of southern novel." - Time magazine
"Biting, clever . . . Following four Berkeley students bent on a bit of guerrilla theater at a Civil War re-enactment in Georgia, Geronimo Johnson never runs out of targets for his satirical pen, from Old South apologists to solipsistic students in the grip of self-righteous political correctness." - Daily Beast
"Audacious, unpredictable, exuberant and even tragic, in the most classic meaning of the word . . . A heady mix of satire and hyperbole. At times, Welcome to Braggsville reads like a literary hybrid of David Foster Wallace and Colson Whitehead." - Los Angeles Times Book Review
"Southern Gothic meets West Coast political correctness with hilarious results in Johnson's new satirical novel. . . . An odyssey through Waffle Houses, evangelical churches and backyard barbecue's ensues, with attitudes about everything from race to social media getting skewered." - New York Post
The most dazzling, most unsettling, most oh-my-God-listen-up novel you'll read this year is called Welcome to Braggsville. . . . T. Geronimo Johnson plays cultural criticism like it's acid jazz. His shockingly funny story pricks every nerve of the American body politic . . . Welcome to Braggsville. It's about time. - Ron Charles, The Washington Post
"Reading this novel is not unlike listening to an erudite satirist play the dozens in a marathon performance . . . Organic, plucky, smart, Welcome to Braggsville is the funniest sendup of identity politics, the academy and white racial anxiety to hit the scene in years." - New York Times Book Review
"As daring a literary high-wire act as has come along in some time. . . . frequently and unabashedly funny . . . [A] volatile mix of stinging satire, linguistic pyrotechnics and heartbreaking narrative." - San Francisco Chronicle
"The unsettling racial satire America needs right now . . . Welcome to Braggsville doesn't offer easy polemic or easier sentimentality, but a deep dive into the American race problem as muddled, terrifying, and absurd as the reality." - Huffington Post
"One of the most invigorating and least predictable novels of the year." - Kevin Brockmeier, award-winning author of The Brief History of the Dead
"A rollicking satire . . . Radical, hilarious, tragic, and all too relevant." - O magazine