Reviews using words like dazzling, playful, extraordinary and masterful only skim the surface of the accolades written about North Carolina native Jason Mott’s most recent novel Hell of a Book, winner of the 2021 National Book Award for Fiction.
Mott will share details of his award winning work at Chatham Literacy’s Fall for Literacy Author’s luncheon, Saturday, November 5th from 11:00am to 2:00pm at the Chatham County Agricultural and Conference Center in Pittsboro, NC.
Proceeds benefit Chatham Literacy. Tickets ($75/person; tables seat 10) are available starting September 1, 2022 here at www.chathamliteracy.org or by calling 919-742-0578.
Mott’s book captured the imagination of the Book Award judges who described his novel as a “structurally and conceptually daring examination of art, fame, family and being Black in America.” National reviews mention Hell of a Book as a daring “teeter-totter” between real life and fiction and a read that “twisted me up and turned me inside out.”
Mott says his novel bubbled into a new form of narrative. As an undergraduate at the University of North Carolina Wilmington Mott wrote unique, strange stories. “I wrote Hell of a Book for myself, just something I wrote outside (of the usual) and it made me feel like a new author again,” Mott said. “I thought it was going to be my greatest failure and felt the book was so odd and doing so many things, I thought it’d be hard for people to connect and see the threads, and then things worked out.”
Mott owns a string of successes. The first of his four novels, The Returned, was a New York Times bestseller and was adapted for an ABC network series called Resurrection. Born in Bolton, North Carolina, Mott graduated with a B.A. in Fiction and Master of Fine Arts in Poetry. Hell of a Book was also longlisted in 2022 for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and Joyce Carol Oates Prize.
When you purchase Hell of a Book at Pittsboro’s McIntyre’s Books, 20% of the sale goes to Chatham Literacy.
Chatham Literacy helps adults living or working in Chatham County acquire the literacy and educational skills they need to function successfully in society.