From a writer called “an important new voice in fiction” by Bret Lott and a “novelist of daring creativity and passion” by Edmund White, comes Our Napoleon in Rags. It’s the story of the regulars at the Don Quixote, a bar in a decaying Midwestern city, whose lives are torn apart when their self-appointed “Napoleon,” Haycraft Keebler, bipolar son of a famous local politician, falls in love with a 15-year-old male hustler. Weaving the hot-button issues of mental illness, pedophilia, racism and police brutality through a novel that is Victorian in its graceful storytelling, Kirby Gann has created not only an extraordinary read, but a biting commentary on contemporary America.
Kirby Gann is the managing editor of Sarabande Books and teaches in the MFA program at Spalding University.

Our Napoleon in Rags

Literature & Fiction

Gann, Kirby

Humor & Satire

Ig Publishing

The Bookmarked series focuses on a famous work of literature that left a powerful impression on an author (hence the name, Bookmarked—a book that left its mark). Each entry in the series will be a no-holds-barred personal narrative detailing how a particular novel influenced an author on their journey to becoming a writer, as well as the myriad directions where that journey has taken them.
In the first book in the series, critically acclaimed author and series editor Kirby Gann takes on John Knowles' classic about the tragic friendship between two boys at a boarding school.
Kirby Gann is the author of the novels Ghosting, Our Napoleon in Rags and The Barbarian Parade. He is the recipient of an Individual Artist Fellowship and two Professional Assistance Awards from the Kentucky Arts Council. Gann is managing editor at Sarabande Books, and teaches in the brief-residency MFA in writing program at Spalding University.

John Knowles' A Separate Peace: Bookmarked (Bookmarked, 1)

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

A dying drug kingpin enslaved to the memory of his dead wife; a young woman torn between a promising future and the hardscrabble world she grew up in; a mother willing to do anything to fuel her addiction to pills; and her youngest son, searching for the truth behind his older brother's disappearance, are just some of the unforgettable characters that populate Ghosting, Kirby Gann's lush and lyrical novel of family and community, and the ties that can both bond and betray. Fleece Skaggs has disappeared, along with drug dealer Lawrence Gruel's reefer harvest. Deciding that the best way to discover what happened to his older brother is to take his place as a drug runner for Gruel, James Cole plunges into a dark underworld of drugs, violence, and long hidden family secrets, where discovering what happened to his brother could cost him his life. A genre-subverting literary mystery told from the alternating viewpoint of different characters, Ghosting is both a simple quest for the truth—what exactly happened to Fleece Skaggs?—and a complex consideration of human frailty.

Ghosting

Literary

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Books by Gann, Kirby