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About Me


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Now, I’m forty, and have already moved away from Maryland, for good. The only problem is that I STILL don’t exactly know where I’m going, so I’m just floating from town to town. Berlin and Montreal sound like the best options, so I’m still trying to choose between them….Other than that, I'm an author, illustrator, run a website and sell records to make ends meet (the writing earns little to nothing). I was born in Atlanta, Georgia in 1967, the son of noted scholar/author Dr. Stephen E. Henderson. He was involved in the Black Arts Movement, which probably explains those strange calls my family gets from time to time....moved to Maryland with family in 1971. Attended a parochial high school for four years before sentencing myself to Howard University, off and on, for six. Obtained bachelor's in 1992. Traveled to most of Europe, North Africa, Brazil, Syria, Romania, and Germany. Became an on/off Berliner in 2002. Wrote Life of Death while in Turkey and Egypt in 1987, published it in 1993(haven't seen any real money from it), published a few other things(no money from those, either), and finally self-published second novel NATE early this year. It recently won the American Book Award.Currently I am writing two novels, and collecting notes for a third. The first novel is about Berlin. No friends of mine will appear in this book for legal reasons, except a distorted version of myself. The second one is about the USA in the future, run by corporate Klansmen--I know that sounds cliched, but it's being done from the perspective of a young black man.Writing these goddamn things is a lot less fun than amateurs think. In fact, facing the typewriter(which I use instead of a laptop, to avoid going blind)is often more challenging than facing the streets. However, once you get past the second or third draft, and especially once you know which shape you want the novel to be in, the headaches start to lighten up. The first draft of the Berlin novel took the better of a year; it sucked shit. The second draft, which I completed late last Summer, also sucked, when I look back on it. However, it was coherent, which the first draft was not. The third is in THIRD PERSON and so far I am enjoying what I am doing with the language….can’t tell you whether or not this is going to suck, however; we’ll have to wait till the fourth draft rolls around.

NATE: a novel, by P. Lewis

..blackI pushed back the sheets, got out of bed, and put on my clothes. I didn’t dare wake her up. I drifted around the room, paralyzed with feelings of disgust. It wasn’t latent puritanism, nor was my bitterness triggered merely by the thought of my endless failures in love—it was my whole goddamn life. It had been a horrible delusion. And the only positive thing was that I’d survived it all. When I really looked back, when I really concentrated, I recalled nothing but insults, ridicule, beatings, addiction, jealousy, loneliness, alienation—the whole boatload, submerged in fogs of despair. There was no hope, no fulfillment possible, so long as I remained trapped within this silly “reality”. But where else was there to go—to the moon?

“P. Lewis is an original talent whose English cuts through a lot of contemporary BS like a butcher knife….It’s important that a powerful novel such as this surfaces at a time when the black lit. scene is being smothered by a lot of dumb frivolous chick-lit and down low scribbling. Anybody want to know where the kick-behind black male literary tradition of Himes, Wright, John A. Williams went? It’s alive and well in Berlin.”

..red--Ishmael Reed, author of Yellow-Back Radio Broke Down and Another Day at the Front

Nathan James Morris: a talented, ambitious black kid from Price George’s County, Maryland. He wants to be an illustrator. But at 19, he has been expelled from Freedom College for alleged misconduct. He has few friends, aside from the parasitic Guy Sellers; and, save for his scholarship’s chump change, even fewer dollars. Hurt, angry and confused, and in desperate need of cash, he joins the Marines. “The road to manhood is paved with tanks and convoys!” he loudly boasts.

But he soon discovers that his own “road” has been paved with far more unpleasant things: whimsical officers, endless bomb attacks, disease, an unbelievable desolation. After the military, his “road” gets rockier....an unhappy reuniting with family, friends and fiancée....a kidnapping in Turkey....violent confrontations with neo-Nazis and racist North Africans....his studies and miseries at C.S.U., America’s most prestigious black university, and his final days in a DC slum, as witness to (and participant in) the wild destruction of his older brother’s marriage, with a little help from the one “friend” who never seems to leave him be: Guy Sellers.

At turns eloquent, elegant, explosive, raw, obscene, shockingly brutal and wildly funny, NATE is a brilliant meditation on what it means to be young, black and male in today’s world.

“A brutally funny novel satirizing diverse subjects from American military misadventures, African-American cultural politics, to the chaos of contemporary American life. Like the protagonists of Nathaniel West's The Day of the Locust or Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, the eponymous hero, Nathan James Morris, is a classic picaro, a naive everyman and would-be artist whose foolhardiness shows us more about American life and the human condition than would seem possible in one novel.”

--Darryl Dickson-Carr, Associate professor of English at Southern Methodist University and author of The Columbia Guide to Contemporary African American Fiction


NATE IS AVAILABLE FROM THE FOLLOWING ONLINE BOOKSTORES:

Amazon.com

Amazon.ca

Amazon.co.uk

Amazon.de

Amazon.co.jp

Amazon.fr

bn.com

powells.com

walmart.com

buy.com

textbookx.com

booksamillion.com

My Interests

I'd like to meet:

Most of the people whom I'd like to meet are already dead: Louis Armstrong, Benny Carter, Henry Miller, James Baldwin(foolishly passed up the opportunity, as I did with Ted Joans), Chester Himes, Charles Bukowski, and others. I would like to meet Robert Crumb(I have some records to trade), Stanley Crouch, Najib Mafouz, Ayi Kwei Armah, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, David Henderson, Colson Whitehead, Eddie Murphy, Paul Beatty, Johnny Depp, Dave Chappelle, Ava Devine(meat, not so much meet), Pauline Crespo(same), Salma Hayek(the same, basically). I've already met, or at least run into Ted Joans(I didn't recognize him, unfortunately!), Al Freeman, Jr., Danny Glover(just saw him sleeping on the couch in the Howard University Blackburn Center, of all places!), Amiri Baraka, Haki Madhubuti, Skunder Boghossian, Lois Mailou Jones, Darius James, Dick Gregory(in my own home town, of all places), Ishmael Reed, Mark Jacobson, Jamie Lidell, Sam Hamod, Pat Cadigan, Terry Bisson, William Joyce(Listen, America, You Don't Even Know Your Own Name), Angie Reed, and some others I can't think of right now.

My Blog

PIGGOUT!!, part one

This is the first of a series detailing the antics of that laughable, yet not-so-loveable creature we all know as the redneck asshole. PiggOut will be regularly updated with PiggFacts(tm), statistics,...
Posted by on Wed, 24 Jun 2009 10:34:00 GMT

Egypt: An African Cancer

Each day, it seems, the situation in Egypt becomes more and more ridiculous. It rarely makes American news because America is not at war with the country, number one, and number two, nothing really ha...
Posted by on Thu, 11 Jun 2009 15:49:00 GMT

Coleman Hawkins in his prime

This film was produced in Holland for Polygoon in 1935. Hawkins had left the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra (and the United States) just a year before, and at this stage he still has the exact...
Posted by on Wed, 05 Mar 2008 06:52:00 GMT

Norman Mailer vs. Rip Torn

Rip Torn almost gets his ear torn off. I could base a sick joke around that, but I don't feel like it.
Posted by on Wed, 05 Mar 2008 04:52:00 GMT

Tuesday Is Just as Bad--an excerpt from a novel about Berlin

Kufurstendamm began so suddenly, so abruptly, just like thatone moment, you were in the rather so-so confines of a large Schoneburg square before the glossy, tinsel-and-fur-lined giddiness hit you fu...
Posted by on Sun, 02 Mar 2008 08:54:00 GMT

THE INTERROGATION -- a short story

When I returned to my dorm that night, I discovered that I'd locked myself out; my keys were still inside my dorm. I helplessly knocked on the door. I could just barely hear my roommate snoring. &nb...
Posted by on Thu, 24 Jan 2008 17:15:00 GMT

On Being Forty--and John Okada's No-No Boy

Sometimes, I fearfully imagined that I wouldn't make it this far. I guess I was wrong. In any event, I still have my fingers crossed in making it through the next few decades, though my angels seem to...
Posted by on Sun, 04 Nov 2007 21:21:00 GMT

Korean Fried Chicken

So bad,--it's actually funny. Korean Fried ChickenPosted May 09, 2005Ultra-violent and racially charged, this chicken commercial defies all logic, yet still satisfies.
Posted by on Sat, 28 Jul 2007 00:30:00 GMT

Too Late

From the old blog, May 15, 2005KABUL - The firestorm of anger continued Monday over Newsweek's handling of a story that alleged U.S. interrogators desecrated the Quran as Muslim leaders and the Bush a...
Posted by on Tue, 10 Jul 2007 22:51:00 GMT

A joke found off the internet

An Irishman, a Mexican and a American Guy were doing construction work onscaffolding on the 20th floor of a building.They were eating lunch and the Irishman said, "Corned beef and cabbage! If Iget cor...
Posted by on Tue, 10 Jul 2007 20:15:00 GMT