Critical Praise

“A partial list of great American writers whose names came to mind as I was reading T. Geronimo Johnson’s new novel, WELCOME TO BRAGGSVILLE: Tom Wolfe, Mark Twain, Toni Morrison, H.L. Mencken, Don DeLillo, David Foster Wallace, Norman Mailer and Ralph Ellison, Ralph Ellison, Ralph Ellison. Johnson’s timely novel is a tipsy social satire about race and the oh-so-fragile ties that bind disparate parts of this country into an imperfect and restless union. It’s an ambitious book that not only wants to say something big about America, but aims to do so in a big American voice that contains multitudes…. [It’s] CONFEDERATES IN THE ATTIC meets A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES…. The novel ends with a tour-de-force riff on black history, which, Johnson writes, ‘in its myriad inversions, loops, whorls, coils, corkscrews, spirals; from slavery to Jim Crow to the Carceral State [is] the helix that stitches the U.S. of A.’s social DNA.’ WELCOME TO BRAGGSVILLE isn’t quite INVISIBLE MAN or WHITE NOISE, but it gets within hailing distance of their heights. It’s as American as chattel slavery and Lenny Bruce Lee.”

—Maureen Corrigan, NPR's Fresh Air

“[WELCOME TO BRAGGSVILLE] flirts with stereotypes, lingers in the familiar, then pivots to afford the characters their humanity…. Reading this novel is not unlike listening to an erudite satirist play the dozens in a marathon performance…. But the satire leaping off these pages is not hate, nor the dead-end cynical variety that withers with a sneer. Here, the observations have too much wit and knowing, the characters too much soul, for Johnson’s story to feel trapped in callow hipster irony…. Organic, plucky, smart, WELCOME TO BRAGGSVILLE is the funniest sendup of identity politics, the academy and white racial anxiety to hit the scene in years…. [Johnson] knows just which dark corners to expose, which cultural buttons to push, which ironies to illuminate and how to whirl an affecting yarn all the while.”

—New York Times Book Review

“The most dazzling, most unsettling, most oh-my-God-listen-up novel you’ll read this year is called WELCOME TO BRAGGSVILLE…. T. Geronimo Johnson plays cultural criticism like it’s acid jazz. His shockingly funny story pricks every nerve of the American body politic.... WELCOME TO BRAGGSVILLE. It’s about time.”

—Ron Charles, The Washington Post