This event will take place off-site at The Haven. Tickets are on sale now here.
Join us for an evening with National Book Award-winning and New York Times-bestselling author James McBride at The Haven. James McBride will be reading from his new novel, Deacon King Kong. Each ticket for this event will include a signed copy of Deacon King Kong. Attendees will be able to pick up their book(s) before the event in the lobby of The Haven. Signed copies of James McBride’s previous books will also be for sale.
About the Book: It’s September 1969, and a fumbling, comical old church deacon known as Sportcoat shuffles into the courtyard of the Cause Houses housing project in south Brooklyn, pulls a .45 from his pocket, and in front of everybody shoots the project’s drug dealer at point-blank range. To uncover the serious causes and the sometimes funny consequences this burst of violence produced, Deacon King Kong takes us through life in the Cause Houses housing projects, not unlike the Red Hook housing projects that produced McBride and that remain an integral part of his life. With humor and compassion McBride brings to vivid life the people affected by the shooting: the members of Sportcoat’s church, the neighborhood’s African-American and Latinx residents, the local cops, the neighborhood Italian mobsters, and Sportcoat himself, all of whom are tied together by destiny, fortune, or happenstance. The result is a deeply moving portrait of an old-fashioned New York neighborhood, a place teeming with characters whose rich, complex lives overlap in surprising ways.
"McBride has a flair for fashioning comedy whose buoyant outrageousness barely conceals both a steely command of big and small narrative elements and a river-deep supply of humane intelligence. An exuberant comic opera set to the music of life."
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
About the Author: James McBride is an accomplished musician and author whose books have been translated into 19 languages and sold millions of copies around the world. He is the author of the National Book Award-winning and New York Times-bestselling The Good Lord Bird, which Showtime is turning into a television series; the bestselling American classic The Color of Water; and the bestsellers Song Yet Sung and Miracle at St. Anna, which was adapted into a film by Spike Lee with a screenplay written by McBride. He is also the author of Kill ‘Em and Leave, a biography of James Brown. Awarded a National Humanities Medal by President Obama “for humanizing the complexities of discussing race in America,” McBride is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University.
Seating Policy: Tickets are general admission and do not necessarily guarantee a seat. If you would like a seat, we recommend arriving early. Doors will open at 6 PM.
Refund Policy: Tickets for this event are nonrefundable.
This event will take place off-site at the Haven, which is located at 112 W Market St, Charlottesville, VA 22902.
James McBride Photo Credit: Chia Messina