Collection
Publication
Riverhead Books (2019), 240 pages
Description
"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. 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. Bryan Washington's brilliant, viscerally drawn world vibrates with energy, wit, and the infinite longing of people searching for home. With soulful insight into what makes a community, a family, and a life, Lot explores trust and love in all its unsparing and unsteady forms."--Inside dust jacket.… (more)
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User reviews
LibraryThing member richardderus
Rating: 4.8* of five
The Publisher Says: Stories of a young man finding his place among family and community in Houston, from a powerful, emerging American voice.
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
This boy and his family experience the tumult of living in the margins, the heartbreak of ghosts, and the braveries of the human heart. The stories of others living and thriving and dying across Houston's myriad neighborhoods are woven throughout to reveal a young woman's affair detonating across an apartment complex, a rag-tag baseball team, a group of young hustlers, the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, a local drug dealer who takes a Guatemalan teen under his wing, and a reluctant chupacabra.
Bryan Washington's brilliant, viscerally drawn world leaps off the page with energy, wit, and the infinite longing of people searching for home. With soulful insight into what makes a community, a family, and a life, Lot is about love in all its unsparing and unsteady forms.
My Review: This is not, appearances to the contratry, autobiographical. It's art, inspired by lived life, and Author Washington isn't its only model. He knew the models better than privileged and pampered Reader Person can. But there's a smoothness and facility that's the hallmark of the born writer, the one who wouldn't fit in no matter what or where or how they grew up. He didn't live in Alief, or maybe he did exist in that space but he was always apart and different and queer...but mostly he was born to be a writer. As always, I will employ the Bryce Method and go story by story with my visceral impressions only lightly toned down and/or tarted up.
Lockwood is a quick hit of what it means to be down and out, illegal, and queer. Also black and queer.
Once, I asked Roberto if he liked it in Texas. He looked at me forever. Called it another place with a name.
Could be worse, I said. You could be back home.
Home's wherever you are at the time, said Roberto.
You're just talking. That doesn't even mean anything.
It would, he said, if you knew you didn't have one.
I live in the same world as these boys and might as well be Arcturian. Yep. This one's a winner. Anything that can tell you that you don't know one single goddamned thing about the city, the state, the country that spawned you? That's a voice you need to listen to.
Alief gives the ragged and rowdy account of the end of several lives, two cheating bastards and a fool of a husband, with the full force and majesty of the Neighborhood behind it. Mistakes, obliviousness, the eternal unchanging voraciousness for Story that makes gossip so damned toxic yet irresistible, addictive. Like...well...reading, if we're all honest, dipping into the universes we weren't invited to inhabit. In this universe we're visiting, the Greek chorus of the folks living there is used to best effect as it dissects not predicts. A good choice, Author Washington.
610 North, 610 West locates us in Houston's geometry, using it as a quick way to orient us to the emotional poles of little man narrator's life. Ma isn't what Pa wants; he finds something he does want; life goes on, the myriad casualties spread in Houston's circular blast radius. Javi the vicious brother starts out ans stays shitty, abusive, homophobic; Jan the eldest sister vanishes, as so many without moorings but with ambitions do. Who's left? The gay little brother! Shocking! he murmured, clutching his pearls. Ma and her queer son. How did that ever happen.
Shepherd follows one young half-Jamaican to his summer of love, his Jamaican whore-cousin (the soursop woman!)'s summer of rest and recovery from multiple tragedies, his sister's sexed-up summer of post-college freshman-year freedom; lots of firsts, not a lot of happiness. Unlike the lower-class family's stories, the parents are window dressing. The boy doesn't become a man, but he knows he's going to and it isn't a comfortable thought. His cruelty to a kind woman is a harbinger of bad things to come, I fear.
Wayside a whole eight pages of horror. "Rick was...the most light-skinned out of all of us, and he carried himself like all of kindness in a bottle." We get down to the double horror of:When we made it to the body, my brother snatched my hand. He made me touch Rick's face. He told me this was what happened to f*gs.
And that, mijos, is the worst and nastiest thing ever felt, thought, said. Our little man narrator doesn't report this with a flinch, just a numb and vacant, deadened, dead-end voice.
Bayou brings us the chupacabra, myth made flesh, that can't or won't save two of life's losers. Boys with names like TeDarus and Mixcoatl don't even inherit the meek's mite of World. They call out for attention, demand to be seen, heard, but when they get it they don't know what to do with it. Mix, poor thing, is gay in a world that needs someone to hate for being Other so he's it. TeDarus is a space-taker. Nothing can save them from oblivion. Nothing is going to change or get better. Like the chupacabra they found, they slip away and there's no proof they were ever here.
Lot is the heart of the book, the heart of the family. Everything comes to a head, breaks, spills its rage-pus down the sides of the boil that these wretched people fester inside. Javi the hater, Jan the jilter, father, mother...all just don't want to see any of the cesspit's contents they're grinding the youngest's face into. RUN I want to scream, take money for the sex, escape however you can! And I know I'm shoutin' down the well. He's not even going to inherit the cesspit.
South Congress has poor Guatemalan illegal Raúl hooked into small-time street-drug sellin' Avery; it's a sad if common tale of someone who was never going to do more than just get by getting by in a place that hates him for being, won't forgive him for existing. Then how that, finally, in the end, blows into smithereens is a shock because I wasn't expecting Author Washington to leave Raúl with an opportunity that he's smart enough to seize but dreads succumbing to. Pungent and packed.
Navigation is such a freakin' hopeless mess of a life story getting *worse* FFS as Nameless the Narrator rejects two...two!...separate chances to get his sh*t in order, maybe get above water by a flippin' nostril, but NOOOOOO
Javi would be proud. /sarcasm
Peggy Park is like the Biblical begats in Chronicles, only this time it's baseball in the ghetto. Bored me. Hard to do with baseball stories, but yeah.
Fannin is the last will and testament of Jan, the jilting sister, who saw her father in a bad way one last time but did nothing. I didn't like her before, now I really despise her. The world she's made is built on, not a lie exactly, a hollow place...an excavation of the root-ball her life sprang from. People like that? I don't envy them one single possession.
Waugh teaches us the lesson that Love's got sh*t to do with reality but will f*ck you up worse than anything else. Poke loves Rod but betrays him by leaving him at Rod's lowest point; all to be with Emil the middle-aged refugee from a place that no longer exists (I'm guessing Lebanon based on his age and backstory). He loves Poke, but can't ever figure in to his picture Poke's love of his calling, the streets. Rod? No one sees it, no one says "oh yeah, that guy" and no one, when he goes looking, can tell Poke anything.
There's no closure to be had on betrayal.
Elgin is the beauty of failure, the glory of losing, the passionate need to f*ck up again. Nicolás. The name that means People's Victory. He alone of all his people...Javi, dead in the ground; Mam booked out to Louisiana; Pa? *shrug*; Jan the arriviste, dreams drowned by Harvey...stayed in his place, stayed long after he lost the will to make a life; he won the loser's lottery by existing, just that, as his life spun out of reach. Sex with one-nighters does nothing to fill you up no matter how big a d*ck he has. Then what? Go to the sea, sit in the water, leave a sad and lonely and worthy man in your bed and....
What's left is existing before exiting. All there is.
Those two-tenths of a point off perfect are for the tedium of Peggy Park and the last-minute narrator naming. Best left, or used throughout, as this feels contrived to me.
The Publisher Says: Stories of a young man finding his place among family and community in Houston, from a powerful, emerging American voice.
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
Show More
working at his family's restaurant, weathering his brother's blows, resenting his older sister's absence. And discovering he likes boys.This boy and his family experience the tumult of living in the margins, the heartbreak of ghosts, and the braveries of the human heart. The stories of others living and thriving and dying across Houston's myriad neighborhoods are woven throughout to reveal a young woman's affair detonating across an apartment complex, a rag-tag baseball team, a group of young hustlers, the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, a local drug dealer who takes a Guatemalan teen under his wing, and a reluctant chupacabra.
Bryan Washington's brilliant, viscerally drawn world leaps off the page with energy, wit, and the infinite longing of people searching for home. With soulful insight into what makes a community, a family, and a life, Lot is about love in all its unsparing and unsteady forms.
My Review: This is not, appearances to the contratry, autobiographical. It's art, inspired by lived life, and Author Washington isn't its only model. He knew the models better than privileged and pampered Reader Person can. But there's a smoothness and facility that's the hallmark of the born writer, the one who wouldn't fit in no matter what or where or how they grew up. He didn't live in Alief, or maybe he did exist in that space but he was always apart and different and queer...but mostly he was born to be a writer. As always, I will employ the Bryce Method and go story by story with my visceral impressions only lightly toned down and/or tarted up.
Lockwood is a quick hit of what it means to be down and out, illegal, and queer. Also black and queer.
Once, I asked Roberto if he liked it in Texas. He looked at me forever. Called it another place with a name.
Could be worse, I said. You could be back home.
Home's wherever you are at the time, said Roberto.
You're just talking. That doesn't even mean anything.
It would, he said, if you knew you didn't have one.
I live in the same world as these boys and might as well be Arcturian. Yep. This one's a winner. Anything that can tell you that you don't know one single goddamned thing about the city, the state, the country that spawned you? That's a voice you need to listen to.
Alief gives the ragged and rowdy account of the end of several lives, two cheating bastards and a fool of a husband, with the full force and majesty of the Neighborhood behind it. Mistakes, obliviousness, the eternal unchanging voraciousness for Story that makes gossip so damned toxic yet irresistible, addictive. Like...well...reading, if we're all honest, dipping into the universes we weren't invited to inhabit. In this universe we're visiting, the Greek chorus of the folks living there is used to best effect as it dissects not predicts. A good choice, Author Washington.
610 North, 610 West locates us in Houston's geometry, using it as a quick way to orient us to the emotional poles of little man narrator's life. Ma isn't what Pa wants; he finds something he does want; life goes on, the myriad casualties spread in Houston's circular blast radius. Javi the vicious brother starts out ans stays shitty, abusive, homophobic; Jan the eldest sister vanishes, as so many without moorings but with ambitions do. Who's left? The gay little brother! Shocking! he murmured, clutching his pearls. Ma and her queer son. How did that ever happen.
Shepherd follows one young half-Jamaican to his summer of love, his Jamaican whore-cousin (the soursop woman!)'s summer of rest and recovery from multiple tragedies, his sister's sexed-up summer of post-college freshman-year freedom; lots of firsts, not a lot of happiness. Unlike the lower-class family's stories, the parents are window dressing. The boy doesn't become a man, but he knows he's going to and it isn't a comfortable thought. His cruelty to a kind woman is a harbinger of bad things to come, I fear.
Wayside a whole eight pages of horror. "Rick was...the most light-skinned out of all of us, and he carried himself like all of kindness in a bottle." We get down to the double horror of:
And that, mijos, is the worst and nastiest thing ever felt, thought, said. Our little man narrator doesn't report this with a flinch, just a numb and vacant, deadened, dead-end voice.
Bayou brings us the chupacabra, myth made flesh, that can't or won't save two of life's losers. Boys with names like TeDarus and Mixcoatl don't even inherit the meek's mite of World. They call out for attention, demand to be seen, heard, but when they get it they don't know what to do with it. Mix, poor thing, is gay in a world that needs someone to hate for being Other so he's it. TeDarus is a space-taker. Nothing can save them from oblivion. Nothing is going to change or get better. Like the chupacabra they found, they slip away and there's no proof they were ever here.
Lot is the heart of the book, the heart of the family. Everything comes to a head, breaks, spills its rage-pus down the sides of the boil that these wretched people fester inside. Javi the hater, Jan the jilter, father, mother...all just don't want to see any of the cesspit's contents they're grinding the youngest's face into. RUN I want to scream, take money for the sex, escape however you can! And I know I'm shoutin' down the well. He's not even going to inherit the cesspit.
South Congress has poor Guatemalan illegal Raúl hooked into small-time street-drug sellin' Avery; it's a sad if common tale of someone who was never going to do more than just get by getting by in a place that hates him for being, won't forgive him for existing. Then how that, finally, in the end, blows into smithereens is a shock because I wasn't expecting Author Washington to leave Raúl with an opportunity that he's smart enough to seize but dreads succumbing to. Pungent and packed.
Navigation is such a freakin' hopeless mess of a life story getting *worse* FFS as Nameless the Narrator rejects two...two!...separate chances to get his sh*t in order, maybe get above water by a flippin' nostril, but NOOOOOO
Javi would be proud. /sarcasm
Peggy Park is like the Biblical begats in Chronicles, only this time it's baseball in the ghetto. Bored me. Hard to do with baseball stories, but yeah.
Fannin is the last will and testament of Jan, the jilting sister, who saw her father in a bad way one last time but did nothing. I didn't like her before, now I really despise her. The world she's made is built on, not a lie exactly, a hollow place...an excavation of the root-ball her life sprang from. People like that? I don't envy them one single possession.
Waugh teaches us the lesson that Love's got sh*t to do with reality but will f*ck you up worse than anything else. Poke loves Rod but betrays him by leaving him at Rod's lowest point; all to be with Emil the middle-aged refugee from a place that no longer exists (I'm guessing Lebanon based on his age and backstory). He loves Poke, but can't ever figure in to his picture Poke's love of his calling, the streets. Rod? No one sees it, no one says "oh yeah, that guy" and no one, when he goes looking, can tell Poke anything.
There's no closure to be had on betrayal.
Elgin is the beauty of failure, the glory of losing, the passionate need to f*ck up again. Nicolás. The name that means People's Victory. He alone of all his people...Javi, dead in the ground; Mam booked out to Louisiana; Pa? *shrug*; Jan the arriviste, dreams drowned by Harvey...stayed in his place, stayed long after he lost the will to make a life; he won the loser's lottery by existing, just that, as his life spun out of reach. Sex with one-nighters does nothing to fill you up no matter how big a d*ck he has. Then what? Go to the sea, sit in the water, leave a sad and lonely and worthy man in your bed and....
What's left is existing before exiting. All there is.
Those two-tenths of a point off perfect are for the tedium of Peggy Park and the last-minute narrator naming. Best left, or used throughout, as this feels contrived to me.
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LibraryThing member Mrs.Soule
Heart-breaking, thought-provoking, and intensely human. I was amazed at how much compassion and humanity the author allowed every character, even the "bad guys." Not a fun book, but gripping and important.
LibraryThing member lisapeet
This was a vivid and affecting window onto a place and population I wasn't well acquainted with before. While I read fiction for many reasons, one of them is to visit lives unlike my own—when it's done well it's like traveling, eye-opening and engaging. Washington's writing swings from rough to
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smooth, bluff to sweet (but never maudlin, no matter how harsh a picture he's painting), with a great dose of compassion floating beneath the surface at all times. Very good work—unpredictable, satisfying, kind. Show Less
LibraryThing member DKnight0918
I enjoyed this collection of short stories more than I thought I would. I can see why Book of the Month selected this for one of their March selections. I look forward to reading more by this promising author. Thanks Edelweiss for the review copy.
LibraryThing member Beth.Clarke
I'm reading the long-list for the Aspen Prize, so I picked up this short story collection. I am not the target audience for this book. I found the characters bland and the stories uninspiring. Being a short story collections, I was hopeful that the next story would be more interesting, but I found
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the stories melt into each other where none stood out. Show Less
LibraryThing member nivramkoorb
This book ended up on many 2019 top 10 lists. It is a debut short story collection and it was very good. It is a series of stories and has a main character who shows up in many of them. s This provides the book with a novel like continuity. Most of the characters are a mix of latino, black, and
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gay. They are also poor and dealing with life in Houston. The stories deal with the tail end of our society and with many of the groups that deal with the issues of racial, sexual, and economic discrimination that is at the forefront of our national discourse. The language is very "street" and is sometimes a little hard to follow. However it gave the stories a rhythm that reflected the nature of the subject matter. This was not a happy collection but for me it was another opportunity to look at the life of people at the lower rung of the ladder. This was a worthwhile read and as a debut I look forward to more from Washington as he has his first novel coming out in the fall. Show Less
LibraryThing member Slevyr26
DNF at page 198 and there are 222 pages. I couldn't force myself to keep reading, even though I had so little left to go. Only one of the stories really grabbed me (the one about the chupacabra) and even then, the grip wasn't that tight. Too much superfluousness that didn't aid or provide detail to
The rest read like an ode to Houston highways and neighborhoods, which there's obviously nothing wrong with, but I just couldn't bring myself to care. There was nothing that really made me like any of the characters or their backgrounds or what they'd done or were doing.
Oh well.
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the stories. It felt a little too try-hard in terms of being poetic. The rest read like an ode to Houston highways and neighborhoods, which there's obviously nothing wrong with, but I just couldn't bring myself to care. There was nothing that really made me like any of the characters or their backgrounds or what they'd done or were doing.
Oh well.
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LibraryThing member dbsovereign
Poetic narrative that borders on something resembling rap - rhythmic and profound, the linked stories are based on life in Houston, Texas. Provides insight into the lives of Latin Americans finding their way in a city to which it is difficult to adjust. This is a heartfelt, poignant and rough read.
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Read it to see what others see and feel when they try to adjust to the expat/immigrant experience. Focused on one family, a boy coming out of the closet, his lovers and a group of hustlers. Poignant and disturbing, but full of raw life. This book is not particularly uplifting but it is certainly transformative. Evocative of something we know exists, but of which we can only partially understand. Show Less
LibraryThing member Narshkite
Stunning. Ugly, smelly, sad, dirty, hopeless -- and rich, nuanced, and endlessly compelling. Washington writes about people I don't see written about, and who I mostly don't know, but somehow I know they are real and I sense that he got it right. These people hanging on for dear life on the edges
My two favorite stories were Waugh and Shephard. Those stories broke my heart as I knew deep down with every sentence where we were heading, and I knew that the endings were inevitable. These people, whom we had gotten to know a bit, needed to destroy anything soft or lovely or humane that might be part of their existence. There seemed no choice. I was also awed by the final story which truly brought together the whole. It might have even ended with some hope, but the rest of the book had taught me not to trust that.
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of a thriving city, doing so in a subculture that rejects them and that they reject (or at least try to.) Jan runs to her "whiteboy," and he treats her well, gives her and her children security, but no matter how beige she goes she doesn't really fit. She fights so hard against her imposter syndrome, but it comes out in her attempted antipathy for everything and everyone she really loves. Javi, seeing he is going down, grasps the last possible foothold but ends up as he would have if he had stayed in the neighborhood. And Nicolas, he has so fully internalized everyone's loathing for his queer self that he cannot allow himself anything good no matter how hard he works. He cannot make himself leave a neighborhood where he is hated and which he hates. These central characters and those around them are all one stroke of bad luck away from homelessness (or in fact have already succumbed.) The streets of the hood provide precious little joy, but it is at least theirs, for the moment. With gentrification redrawing the boundaries even their meager shitty holdings are tenuous or gone.My two favorite stories were Waugh and Shephard. Those stories broke my heart as I knew deep down with every sentence where we were heading, and I knew that the endings were inevitable. These people, whom we had gotten to know a bit, needed to destroy anything soft or lovely or humane that might be part of their existence. There seemed no choice. I was also awed by the final story which truly brought together the whole. It might have even ended with some hope, but the rest of the book had taught me not to trust that.
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LibraryThing member tanyaferrell
I read Memorial in one sitting and this one took a lot longer, but it was equally as good and maybe more meaningful / relatable to me. Bryan Washington is definitely my favorite contemporary author...for so many reasons.
The obvious...he does an amazing job of writing about place. It's so easy to
I read this shortly after reading the Death of Vivek Oji, another queer work and Lot:Stories felt refreshing in how it handled identity in that it barely did. Racial and sexual identities are just attributes to characters who are dealing with so much more. There is a matter-of-factness to how Washington handles it all. And I thought that was what I loved so much about it.
But, I was also re-reading The Fire Next Time as I read this and Baldwin has a line in it about being unseen. "Black people, mainly, look down or look up but do not look at each other, not at you, and white people, mainly, look away." And I think this idea is what I actually find relatable in Washington's work. He writes characters who aren't fully seen. No one's making a serious effort to pry them open and they don't know how or don't feel comfortable putting it all out there. The black queer characters specifically are not exposing their emotional interiors to anybody and they're quick to brush off any weak attempts by others to get in.
If you equate being seen to being loved, which Baldwin does in his essay, then this hold on privacy becomes an obstacle to love. So, every other short story, we follow Nicolás and his family and his journey toward figuring this sh*t out. And the hopeful ending to the collection really pushed this from like a 4.5 to a 5 star read for me.
Lastly, I have to shout out Bayou as my third favorite story because it's the only satisfying love story in the book, platonic guy friends who're full of forgiveness, hugging it out and fighting it out when necessary. Also CHUPACABRAS!
I borrowed this from the library and am excited to buy a physical copy so I can reread it whenever I want.
The obvious...he does an amazing job of writing about place. It's so easy to
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feel immersed in the communities he writes about. And like many queer authors and authors who write about queer characters, found family is a big theme in the work. Peggy Park and Alief were my favorite stories in the collection because stories where strangers feel like family always hit me especially hard. I read this shortly after reading the Death of Vivek Oji, another queer work and Lot:Stories felt refreshing in how it handled identity in that it barely did. Racial and sexual identities are just attributes to characters who are dealing with so much more. There is a matter-of-factness to how Washington handles it all. And I thought that was what I loved so much about it.
But, I was also re-reading The Fire Next Time as I read this and Baldwin has a line in it about being unseen. "Black people, mainly, look down or look up but do not look at each other, not at you, and white people, mainly, look away." And I think this idea is what I actually find relatable in Washington's work. He writes characters who aren't fully seen. No one's making a serious effort to pry them open and they don't know how or don't feel comfortable putting it all out there. The black queer characters specifically are not exposing their emotional interiors to anybody and they're quick to brush off any weak attempts by others to get in.
If you equate being seen to being loved, which Baldwin does in his essay, then this hold on privacy becomes an obstacle to love. So, every other short story, we follow Nicolás and his family and his journey toward figuring this sh*t out. And the hopeful ending to the collection really pushed this from like a 4.5 to a 5 star read for me.
Lastly, I have to shout out Bayou as my third favorite story because it's the only satisfying love story in the book, platonic guy friends who're full of forgiveness, hugging it out and fighting it out when necessary. Also CHUPACABRAS!
I borrowed this from the library and am excited to buy a physical copy so I can reread it whenever I want.
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ISBN
0525533672 / 9780525533672