Part Memoir, Part Fiction, New Novel Presents a Jazzy Riff on Race, Sex

A ribald, riotous look at growing up gay in the striving, black middle-class of the ‘60s and ‘70s

PARADISE, CALIFORNIA, UNITED STATES, June 18, 2024 /EINPresswire.com/ — Author Leonce Gaiter’s “A Memory of Fictions (or) Just Tiddy-Boom” is winning critical praise as a modern, jazzy take on the bildungsroman that uses everything from personal memoir, a fugue-like structure, poetry, images, and diaries to paint a vivid, eloquent portrait of gay, black, Jessie Vincent Grandier and the striving African American middle class that shaped him in the 1960s.

Blue Ink Review stated, “Gaiter’s wonderfully evocative language, filled with musicality, captures the complexity of Jessie’s emotions as he struggles to make sense of his sexuality and place in the world.”

IndieReader called it, “…a bold novel. Sometimes beautiful, sometimes brutal, the prose is always thoroughly engrossing.”

Reader Views wrote, “If Ernest Hemingway was black, gay, and writing about growing up in the [1960s], he would have written something like Leonce Gaiter’s “A Memory of Fictions (or) Just Tiddy-Boom.”

More personal than his previous work, “A Memory of Fictions (or) Just Tiddy-Boom” plays with the nexus of memory and make believe. “I can’t even tell where the facts of my life end and my perceptions of those facts distort them to the level of fiction. With this book, I stopped pretending I could tell the difference. It’s part truth, part twisted truth, part complete fancy.”

The focus on the black, “striver” middle-class of the 1960s is also a unique aspect of the novel. “I think it’s incredibly valuable to look at this black bourgeois class to understand some of what you’re seeing today. A significant aspect of the backlash you see now comes from a racist reaction to the striver’s dream—African-Americans firmly in the seats of American power. A president, for instance.”

Gaiter’s other novels have also met with acclaim. “I Dreamt I Was in Heaven – The Rampage of the Rufus Buck Gang,” is a historical novel based on a shocking, little known episode in American history. Harvard Magazine noted, “The novel’s raw, unvarnished portrait of the Old West sounds and feels both grittier and more real than the place frequently seen in Hollywood Westerns and on television.”

Dick Adler of The Chicago Tribune praised his noir, “Bourbon Street, comparing it to the works of James Sallis, Dick Lochte and James Lee Burke. Now comes a debut book by Leonce Gaiter,” he wrote, “that deserves a place on that map.”

Author information: https://www.leoncegaiter.com/

For review copies or interview requests, please contact [email protected].

Link to press information: https://www.leoncegaiter.com/Press/index.html

Cait Longeer
Legba Books
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