My mother never forgot that picture in her mind. She said out of the throng of people, suddenly after looking for a long time, she said a cop just appeared and he was holding my sister's hand - she was a little girl. When I was a kid, my mother told me about the time my sister got lost at the circus in New York in Madison Square Garden. You have to really shape your characters properly. Because you edit in your mind when you write in longhand. I force my students to write in longhand every week. Establish your stories in a specific time and place and get your characters set solidly within that framework before you let them start moving from one room to the next. I tell them that a simple story is the best story, and that time and place is really crucial to good storytelling. On the guidance he gives his NYU students King Kong is a homebrew, a rotgut kind of drink - joy juice, booze - that Sport Coat enjoys drinking. And so he's kind of the king of the projects. This is our family, and family is oftentimes, you know, funny and rude and just ridiculously out of place, but they're still family. He's the uncle who comes to the house at Christmas every year and pulls out his teeth. I've known many like him over the course of my life. On Sport Coat - the 'king of the projects'

And so I wrote a book about my heroes, really. I admire my students and their mothers, and in some cases their fathers, and in some cases the cousins who are raising them. I still work in my old housing project in Brooklyn. Your purchase helps support NPR programming.

'It's a place where, you know, but you can't blame someone for doing something stupid, because it's a stupid world.'Ĭlose overlay Buy Featured Book Title Deacon King Kong Author James McBride and goes out into the plaza of the housing projects and shoots the most ruthless, notorious drug dealer in the housing project. 'At the beginning of the book, an old deacon who's affectionately known as Sport Coat gets drunk. McBride's new novel, Deacon King Kong, opens with a shooting, then soon moves - improbably, memorably - into laughs, love, quirky and compelling characters, and the connective tissue of human experience in multiracial Brooklyn in the summer of 1969. You get to show redemption, and forgiveness, and you get to show the parts of people that most of us never get to see.' 'In the real world, villains too often succeed and heroes, too often die,' says writer James McBride - and that's one of the great things about being novelist. James McBride is also the author of The Color of Water and won the National Book Award for Fiction for The Good Lord Bird.

Book review of deacon king kong