From the award-winning Walter Mosley comes a dazzling novel of ideas about the sexual and intellectual coming-of-age of an unusual man who goes by the name Woman.
Books
John Woman
A convention-defying novel by a bestselling writer.
by Walter Mosley
About the Book
A convention-defying novel by bestselling writer Walter Mosley, John Woman recounts the transformation of an unassuming boy named Cornelius Jones into John Woman, an unconventional history professor—while the legacy of a hideous crime lurks in the shadows.
At twelve years old, Cornelius, the son of an Italian-American woman and an older black man from Mississippi named Herman, secretly takes over his father’s job at a silent film theater in New York’s East Village. Five years later, as Herman lives out his last days, he shares his wisdom with his son, explaining that the person who controls the narrative of history controls their own fate. After his father dies and his mother disappears, Cornelius sets about reinventing himself—as Professor John Woman, a man who will spread Herman’s teachings into the classrooms of his unorthodox southwestern university and beyond. But there are other individuals who are attempting to influence the narrative of John Woman, and who might know something about the facts of his hidden past.
Engaging with some of the most provocative ideas of recent intellectual history, John Woman is a compulsively readable, deliciously unexpected novel about the way we tell stories, and whether the stories we tell have the power to change the world.
Praise
for JOHN WOMAN and Walter Mosley
“Mosley’s characters are always complicated; there is always good and bad in them. Professor Woman says life is complicated so we ought not judge other people. But that’s something he says while claiming to be innocent of a crime he’s charged with. We readers know he’s guilty, but we also know why he did it. Is it OK for a relatively good person to hurt a relatively bad person? Mosley takes old questions like that and makes them fresh again.” —The Seattle Times
“Mosley is at his commanding, comfort-zone-blasting best in this heady tale of a fugitive genius. His hero’s lectures are marvels of intellectual pyrotechnics and provocative inquiries; intense sex scenes raise questions about gender roles and intimacy; and John Woman’s increasingly drastic predicament and complex moral quandary precipitate arresting insights into race, freedom, power, and the stories we tell to try to make sense of the ceaseless torrent of human conflict and desire…this collision of crime and academic jousting will incite special interest. –Booklist (starred review)
“A writer whose work transcends category and qualifies as serious literature.”—Time
“Mosley is one of the most humane, insightful, powerful prose stylists working today in any genre. He’s also one of the most radical…. Immerse yourself in the work of one of our national treasures.” —The Austin Chronicle
“When reviewing a book by Walter Mosley, it’s hard not to simply quote all the great lines. There are so many of them. You want to share the pleasures of Mosley’s jazz-inflected dialogue and the moody, descriptive passages reminiscent of Raymond Chandler at his best.”
—Washington Post, on Down the River Unto the Sea
“A daring, beautifully wrought story that incorporates elements of allegory, meditative reflection and the lilt of lyric tragedy. ”—Los Angeles Times, on The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey
“The versatile, justly celebrated creator of Easy Rawlins, Leonid McGill, and other iconic crime solvers raises the stakes with this tightly wound combination of psychological suspense and philosophic inquiry…Here he weaves elements of both the erotic and the speculative into a taut, riveting, and artfully edgy saga…Somehow, it makes sense that when Walter Mosley puts forth a novel of ideas, it arrives with the unexpected force of a left hook and the metallic gleam of a new firearm.” —Kirkus Reviews
“With Mosley, there’s always the surprise factor—a cutting image or a bracing line of dialogue.”—New York Times Book Review, on And Sometimes I Wonder About You
“Mosley’s invigorating, staccato prose and understanding of racial, moral and social subtleties are in full force.”—Seattle Times, on Known to Evil
“[Mosley has] revitalized two genres, the hard-boiled novel and the American behaviorist novel.”—Roberto Bolaño
“Mosley is the Gogol of the African-American working class—the chronicler par excellence of the tragic and the absurd.”—Vibe
“[Mosley] has a special talent for touching upon these sticky questions of evil and responsibility without getting stuck in them.”—New Yorker
Excerpt
One evening Herman stopped his son in the middle of The Confessions of Saint Augustine and said, “This is the power of the world, boy. The memory of an unattainable paradise where everything is predictable and outwardly control-lable. It is all that we are; history, memory. It is what happened, or what we decide on believing has happened. It is yesterday and a million years ago. It is today but still we cannot grasp it.”
“I don’t know what you mean, dad,” Cornelius said. He was sixteen that day but his father, for all his interest in history, did not remember the date. Since he was in his bed almost twenty-four hours a day he had no need for a calendar.
“I mean that the person who controls history controls their fate. The man who can tell you what happened, or did not happen, is lord and master of all he surveys.”
“But if he claims something that isn’t true then he’s master of a lie,” Cornelius reasoned.
Herman smiled and leaned forward. “But,” he said, holding up a lecturing finger, “if everyone believes the lie then he controls a truth that we all as-sent to. There is no true event, Cornelius, only a series of occurrences open to interpretation.”
Though Cornelius did not know it for many years, this was the moment of the birth of John Woman.
