James Hannaham Libri

After more than twenty years in prison, a trans woman newly released on parole spends a whirlwind Fourth of July weekend in Brooklyn trying to reconcile with the son she left behind and to reunite with a family reluctant to accept her true identity. Carlotta Mercedes has been misunderstood her entire life. When she was pulled into a robbery gone wrong, she still went by the name she'd grown up with in Fort Greene, Brooklyn - before it gentrified. But not long after her conviction, she took the name Carlotta and began to live as a woman, an embrace of selfhood that prison authorities rejected, keeping Carlotta trapped in an all-male cell block, abused by both inmates and guards, and often placed in solitary. But in her fifth appearance before the parole board, Carlotta is at last granted conditional freedom and given a bus ticket back to a New York City that has changed as much in the intervening decades as she herself has changed to those who knew her before she was sent away. Can she reconcile with the son she left behind and reunite with a family reluctant to accept her as Carlotta, all while complying with near-impossible parole restrictions and doing everything in her power to stay out of jail? Written with the same mischievous verve and astonishing freshness in Delicious Foods, which dazzled critics and listeners alike, Didn't Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta sweeps the listener through seemingly every street of Brooklyn in a whirlwind Fourth of July weekend. The novel sings with brio and ambition, offering a fantastically entertaining story and a cast of unforgettable characters even as it challenges us to confront the glaring injustices of a prison system that continues to punish people even after they've been freed

A moving story of freedom, perseverance, and survival.

Exploring the complexities of morality and the human experience, this narrative offers a heartfelt and humorous glimpse into a character's internal battle to make ethical choices. Through a blend of wit and vulnerability, the story delves into the challenges of navigating life's dilemmas, highlighting the universal struggle to balance personal desires with a sense of responsibility. The journey promises to resonate with readers, inviting them to reflect on their own choices and the intricacies of doing what is right.

"From visual artist and award-winning writer of Delicious Foods, a book of prose and images that uses the poetry of Fernando Pessoa and the history of air disasters to investigate con men, identity politics, failures of leadership, the privilege of ineptitude, the slave trade, and the nature of consciousness. Early in 2017, on a plane trip from Cape Verde to Lisbon, James Hannaham started reading Pessoa & Co., Richard Zenith's English translation of Fernando Pessoa's selected works. It was two months since the presidential election; like many people, ideas about unfitness for service and failures of leadership were very much on his mind. Imagine his consternation upon opening the Pessoa anthology to discover that the first line in the first poem, The Keeper of Sheep is: "I've never kept sheep/But it's as if I did." The Portuguese, Hannaham had been musing, were also responsible for jump-starting colonialism and the global slave trade, which gradually became racialized based on false beliefs about people of African descent. Pessoa published only one book in Portuguese in his lifetime, Mensagem, which consisted of unselfconscious paeans to European explorers. Hannaham felt compelled to respond to Pessoa's work in some way: to undo it in certain respects, and to rescue from it what still felt relevant. Once in Lisbon, he began a quasi-daily practice of reading a poem from Zenith's anthology, meditating on a response, and writing a piece in whatever mode seemed to click, regardless of form or genre. This book is the result of that practice"-- Provided by publisher