Jason Mott

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Michael Becker Photography

Author Jason Mott.

Jason Mott

When you title your latest novel Hell of a Book, you better deliver. And that’s exactly what Jason Mott did. His book about a Black author on a cross-country promotional tour won the 2021 National Book Award for Fiction. Mott’s work is more than just a fictional travelogue, though, as the story also tells the parallel tale of Soot (a young Black boy living in a rural town) and The Kid (who might or might not be figment of the narrator’s imagination). With unflinching honesty and humor, Mott cuts to the core of the American experience in the 2020s, replete with racism, police violence and dire consequences. Mott will speak about the book at this free Wisconsin Book Festival event.

media release: An astounding work of fiction from New York Times bestselling author Jason Mott, always deeply honest, at times electrically funny, that goes to the heart of racism, police violence, and the hidden costs exacted upon Black Americans and America as a whole

In Jason Mott’s Hell of a Book, a Black author sets out on a cross-country publicity tour to promote his bestselling novel. That storyline drives Hell of a Book and is the scaffolding of something much larger and more urgent: Mott’s novel also tells the story of Soot, a young Black boy living in a rural town in the recent past, and The Kid, a possibly imaginary child who appears to the author on his tour.

As these characters’ stories build and converge, they astonish. For while this heartbreaking and magical book entertains and is at once about family, love of parents and children, art and money, it’s also about the nation’s reckoning with a tragic police shooting playing over and over again on the news. And with what it can mean to be Black in America.

Who has been killed? Who is The Kid? Will the author finish his book tour, and what kind of world will he leave behind?  Unforgettably told, with characters who burn into your mind and an electrifying plot ideal for book club discussion, Hell of a Book is the novel Mott has been writing in his head for the last ten years. And in its final twists, it truly becomes its title.

Jason Mott has published four novels. His first novel, The Returned, was a New York Times bestseller and was turned into a TV series that ran for two seasons. He has a BFA in Fiction and an MFA in Poetry, both from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. His poetry and fiction have appeared in various literary journals, and his most recent novel, Hell of a Book, was named the winner of the National Book Award for Fiction, 2021.