"Together, these tracks will open your senses to a sharply original and supremely powerful voice, an angry yet oddly poetic voice, inventing, as it goes along, the language to write simultaneously “to folks (or sensibilities) who don’t read for a living and those folks (or sensibilities) who are paid to read for a living”, as well as to write back to a jagged, damaged, and ultimately surreal American reality, that in its bald truth tends more towards the “American nightmare” that Malcolm X had talked about way back in the early 1960s than towards the triumphalist rhetoric of the American Dream that still measures itself against the dollar, and deigns to distributes democratic lifestyles to other parts of the world." -Scroll.In
"Laymon approached How to Slowly Kill as an album, with each essay a different track. The book contains odes to black American heroes, dirges and ballads to family members past and present, and the occasional skit. At its core beats the rat-a-tat-tat that knocks at the core of modern America: the shameful, insidious racism endured by the hyphenated African-American population. Occasionally, from the treatment of Rosa Parks to the killing of Trayvon Martin, the banging becomes so loud it drowns out all else." -Independent
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"With Long Division, Laymon gives us a story that embodies the ellipsis, the idea of an understood but unspoken beginning and ending. Narratives very rarely end; they go through edits and revisions. Characters are added and erased. For a book that begins with a grammar and language competition,Long Division fittingly ends with a statement about language, and that statement is that language, like history, never stops moving forward." -Los Angeles Review of Books
"In a multilayered, allusion-packed, time-traveling plot set in Mississippi, Long Division takes us, nesting-doll-style, from 2013 to 1985, 1964, and back, engaging complex questions of race, violence, gender, sexuality, and our relationship to history. More than anything, Laymon shows with surprising lucidity how American racialized inequality is persistent but mutable, that the past is not the present, but isn’t, either, entirely past." -The Boston Review
"Long Division finally gave me what I’ve wanted to see in contemporary southern literature. For years I’ve complained about no recent accounts of black southerners in American Literature. It goes down in southern rap – which we’ll get to in the following paragraphs – but in literary studies it’s always been the old guard: Hurston, Ellison, Wright, Gaines, and Alice Walker (I swear, if I read “Everyday Use” in one more class I’d quit life). Long Division basically told me “sit down and shut the hell up. Here it is. Here’s what you wanted.” -Regina Bradley, author of Outkasted Conversations
"Long Division is a serious book about race and love with a thread of humor running through it, emerging largely from Laymon's wordplay and the cultural gaps that exist between characters from the past, present and future. With roots in Southern and African American literature, Long Division is an historical novel that touches on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and a work of magical realism in the tradtion of Haruki Murakami, an influence to which Laymon overtly tips his hat with the slightly disruptive presence of a talking cat." -Contemporary Literature
"As if anything could be beyond what Laymon has done for race, temporality, geography, and the South—as well as for the real and transhistorical black southerner—there is also what Long Division does for questions of love, death, and dying. Across cities/Cities, there is the looming and encompassing quality of love that bends sexuality and familial boundaries." -Zandria Robinson, Author of This Ain't Chicago
"Laymon depicts so many different ways of resisting the insidious effects of centuries of racism; it’s a beautifully textured look at what racism has looked like at different points in our country’s history, and how people have dealt with it." -Reading The End
"It’s the blending of humor and tragedy in Laymon’s narrative voice that brings to mind what Dickens called “streaky bacon”—the funny/sad juxtoposition that he claimed he owed so much of his success to and that thing that’s become so integral to the irresistible voices of writers like Jennifer Clement, Frank McCourt, Sherman Alexie, and Tayari Jones. Laymon is right up there with all of them—cut from that fabric, too. And it’s the trifecta of his honesty, his scope, and his voice that makes this book a particularly poignant read." -Cross Fading Magazine
"Laymon’s essays, though slim, pack myriad emotions and examinations of emotional death. The writing is strong throughout; he seldom wastes an explanation or metaphor. Though the blues impulse is present, he raps familiar, like an older brother. His pieces tend to reach a gospel crescendo, like a preacher." -The Rumpus
"Kiese Laymon is an amazing, courageous and brave novelist and essayist.... Laymon fiercely tackles issues of prejudice, adolescence and love with a swagger and confidence all his own. You rarely find novels this honest and engaging. Read this book." -Michigan Quarterly Review
“Laymon is a brilliant young writer...this is a book that sings in the heart but challenges readers to take careful consideration of the power of memory. Like the best of Hurston, Ellison, or Bambara, Laymon’s craft flows on frequencies that both honor and extend the traditions those writers established.” —William Henry Lewis, author of I Got Somebody in Staunton
"Funny, astute and searching.... The author's satirical instincts are excellent. He is also intimately attuned to the confusion of young black Americans who live under the shadow of a history that they only gropingly understand and must try to fill in for themselves." —Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal
"Don't miss Kiese Laymon's Long Division. One Mississippi town with two engaging stories in two very different decades. The sharp humor and deep humanity make this debut novel unforgettable." —Melissa Harris-Perry, MSNBC
"A novel within a novel—hilarious, moving and occasionally dizzying.... Laymon cleverly interweaves his narrative threads and connects characters in surprising and seemingly impossible ways. Laymon moves us dazzlingly (and sometimes bewilderingly) from 1964 to 1985 to 2013 and incorporates themes of prejudice, confusion and love rooted in an emphatically post-Katrina world." —Kirkus Reviews
"Laymon’s debut novel is an ambitious mix of contemporary southern gothic with Murakamiesque magical realism.... the book elegantly showcases Laymon’s command of voice and storytelling skill in a tale that is at once dreamlike and concrete, personal and political." —Booklist
“Smart, exciting and energetic...the language romps and roars along through some truly wonderful comic scenes and yet the book doesn’t hesitate to comment seriously on questions that matter to human beings everywhere, not just in rural Mississippi.” —Victor LaValle, author of Big Machine and Slapboxing with Jesus
"A little fantasy, a little mystery and a lot hilarious." —Atlanta Journal-Constitution
"A curious, enjoyable novel...take[s] relish in skewering the disingenuous masquerade of institutional racism..." —Publishers Weekly
"Long Division is one of those books that I picked up and just couldn’t stop reading...powerful, a classic American novel.... By far one of my favorite books." —Jeff Chang, author ofCan't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation and Total Chaos: The Art and Aesthetics of Hip-Hop
"Laymon’s voice is unique, a rarity in an era during which fiction tends all too often to chase trends.... At times touching, at times poignant, Laymon more than once strikes a beautiful chord in the midst of what often feels gritty and intentionally provocative. Those touching insights make Long Division worth the effort, and readers who stick with the story (stories, actually) will find themselves thinking about City and the people in his life long after they close the book." —Chicago Book Review
“The racial/ethical awareness is as complex as Coetzee’s, and Laymon is just as good a writer. Laymon takes some real risks. I love the interplay of spirituality and sexuality. Nothing sounds forced, pandering or trendy. City, the husky citizen of the imagination, feels totally singular and totally representative. That’s tough to pull off.” —Tim Strode, author of Ethics of Exile
"[How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America] is not intended to serve as "a woe-is-we narrative" about the difficulties of being black in America or the South...or even an attempt to illuminate the taboo-amongst-black-folk subject of mental health—although both serve as narrative threads in Laymon's writing. Rather, it's an exercise in recalling memories." —Jackson Free Press
"If Laymon’s novel runs into some plotting problems over the course of its run, it succeeds in doing something more emotionally moving, producing a series of crystalline moments when City comes to a clearer understanding of the world he lives in–and the kind of man he wants to be in it." -The Washington Post
Novelist, professor, and social commentator , called Long Division "[an] ambitious novel, and though it is raw and flawed, it is the most exciting book I’ve read all year. There’s nothing like it, both in terms of the scope of what the book tackles and the writing’s Afro Surrealist energy." -Roxane Gay, The Nation
Funny, astute and searching…. The author’s satirical instincts are excellent. He is also intimately attuned to the confusion of young black Americans who live under the shadow of a history that they only gropingly understand and must try to fill in for themselves. —The Wall Street Journal
Smart and funny and sharp. —Jesmyn Ward