NAMED A "BEST BOOK OF THE SUMMER," "MOST ANTICIPATED," OR "NEW AND NOTEWORTHY BOOK" BY ESQUIRE, COSMOPOLITAN, LitHub, BOOK RIOT, Ms. MAGAZINE, THE MILLIONS, LAMBDA LITERARY, POETS & WRITERS, POPSUGAR, BRITTLE PAPER, AND MORE.
A Greenlight First Editions Book Club Selection A Radical Book Collective Book Club Selection
"Disarmingly funny." - The New York Times
"Incisive and innovative"..... "Harry Sylvester Bird is a bildungsroman for our time: a coming-of-race novel.... [and] raises questions about whiteness, identity and its limits, and the psychology, politics, and culture of race. [The novel] utilizes a potent mix of satire and horror to produce the creeping uneasiness that infuses so much of the American psyche right now. Okparanta is also exploring a (or perhaps the) tension at the center of American Literature." - The Washington Independent Review of Books
"Harry Sylvester Bird is a powerful story about the kind of racism that disguises as love and desire for black bodies, black life, and black pain.... The desire for racial metamorphosis is at the heart of the story. It opens a space where Okparanta examines the many forms that racism can take.... Parts of the novel are laugh-out-loud funny. The satire is deliciously biting. The pacing of the narration is perfect. The writing is spare and stunning.... [T]he (very) near-future speculative element in the story gives the novel its distinct feel.... [Harry Sylvester Bird] reprises the same bold elegance with which Okparanta engaged homophobia many years ago. With this new novel, she is still asking readers to confront the unexamined assumptions that blur their vision of the world." - The Herald
"A tart questioning exploration of how deep racism runs." - Kirkus
"Inventive." - Publishers Weekly
"Ambitious and daring." - Booklist
"In this oddly affecting novel..., Okparanta has laid bare some of our most vexing issues on race and identity, most notably those involving extremism and intolerance. Her unorthodox approach invites us — at our own risk — on an offbeat journey at once rattling and revealing." - The Star Tribune
From the award-winning author of Under the Udala Trees and Happiness, Like Water comes a brilliant, provocative, up-to-the-minute novel about a young white man's education and miseducation in contemporary America.
Harry Sylvester Bird grows up in Edward, Pennsylvania, with his parents, Wayne and Chevy, whom he greatly dislikes. They're racist, xenophobic, financially incompetent, and they have quite a few secrets of their own. To Harry, they represent everything wrong with this country. And his small town isn't any better. He witnesses racial profiling, graffitied swastikas, and White Power signs on his walk home from school. He can't wait until he's old enough to leave. When he finally is, he moves straight to New York City, where he feels he can finally live out his true inner self.
In the city, he meets and falls in love with Maryam, a young Nigerian woman. But when Maryam begins to pull away, Harry is forced to confront his identity as he never has before—if he can.
Brilliant, funny, original, and unflinching, Harry Sylvester Bird is a satire that speaks to all the most pressing tensions and anxieties of our time—and of the history that has shaped us and might continue to do so.
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