Graffiti Palace (Relié)

"What an audacious debut : a novel that reframes The Odyssey as a journey across Los Angeles during the Watts Riots. Beautiful, hard-edged, challenging, and unexpected, Graffiti Palace recalls the linguistic exuberance of Thomas Pynchon while evoking the surreal landscape of a city under siege. At the same time, it never loses sight of the essential human drama-the desire, despite (or because of) everything that's happening, to find a pas,agc home." David L.
Ulin, author of Sidewalking : Coming to Terms with Los Angeles and editor of Writing Los Angeles : A Literary Anthology. "Reading Graffiti Palace, I half wondered if the Watts Riots had been staged all those years ago just so A. G. Lombardo could write a novel about it. This is a book that's as crazy and unpredictable as an urban uprising ; it's a phantasmagoric journey, written in precise and haunting prose, through a wounded and defiant city called Los Angeles." Hector Tobar, author of The Barbarian Nurseries and Deep Down Dark.
"An electrifying new voice in American fiction. A. G. Lombardo's wildly entertaining debut reimagines the 1965 Watts Riots as a Homeric journey through rioting cops, burning streets, CIA conspiracies, and the potentially fatal semiotics of race and oppression in America. Along the way, we also run into Godzilla, Elijah Muhammad, the greatest taggers in the history of Los Angeles freeway art, and a deadly fortune cookie war.
Graffiti Palace is a stunning arrival, easily the most exciting book of the year." Evan Wright, author of Generation Kill.