Welcome to Braggsville

National Bestseller From the PEN/Faulkner finalist and critically acclaimed
author of Hold It ’Til It Hurts comes a dark and socially provocative
Southern-fried comedy about four UC Berkeley students who stage a dramatic
protest during a Civil War reenactment—a fierce, funny, tragic work from a
bold new writer. Welcome to Braggsville. The City that Love Built in the
Heart of Georgia. Population 712 Born and raised in the heart of old Dixie,
D’aron Davenport finds himself in unfamiliar territory his freshman year at
UC Berkeley. Two thousand miles and a world away from his childhood, he is
a small-town fish floundering in the depths of a large, hyper-liberal pond.
Caught between the prosaic values of his rural hometown and the
intellectualized multicultural cosmopolitanism of Berzerkeley, the
nineteen-year-old white kid is uncertain about his place until one
disastrous party brings him three idiosyncratic best friends: Louis, a
“kung-fu comedian" from California; Candice, an earnest do-gooder claiming
Native roots from Iowa; and Charlie, an introspective inner-city black teen
from Chicago. They dub themselves the “4 Little Indians.” But everything
changes in the group’s alternative history class, when D’aron lets slip
that his hometown hosts an annual Civil War reenactment, recently rebranded
“Patriot Days.” His announcement is met with righteous indignation, and
inspires Candice to suggest a “performative intervention” to protest the
reenactment. Armed with youthful self-importance, makeshift slave costumes,
righteous zeal, and their own misguided ideas about the South, the 4 Little
Indians descend on Braggsville. Their journey through backwoods churches,
backroom politics, Waffle Houses, and drunken family barbecues is
uproarious to start, but will have devastating consequences. With the keen
wit of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk and the deft argot of The Brief
Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, T. Geronimo Johnson has written an astonishing,
razor-sharp satire. Using a panoply of styles and tones, from tragicomic to
Southern Gothic, he skewers issues of class, race, intellectual and
political chauvinism, Obamaism, social media, and much more. A literary
coming-of-age novel for a new generation, written with tremendous social
insight and a unique, generous heart, Welcome to Braggsville reminds us of
the promise and perils of youthful exuberance, while painting an indelible
portrait of contemporary America.