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.
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.
"Audacious... A profound exploration of the true meaning of borders, written very much for and about our current cultural moment...Washington is a one-man border-eradicating crew....There's a knowing grin of local familiarity here, yet Washington also manages to present this melancholy, jolly story in the voice of a collective 'we' that renders the collection universal." – Luis Alberto Urrea, The New York Times Book Review
Riverhead Books, 2019. Hardcover.