Nate
Description
Originally published in 2006, this powerful, disturbing, award-winning novel chronicles the free-wheeling mishaps of one Nathan James Morris, a talented, ambitious middle-class black kid from Prince Georges County, Maryland. 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 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 fiancee....a kidnaping 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.
"NATE'S clear, observatory power comes from the author's unmitigated rage against a world built on hypocrisy and spite...The insight such a writer brings to our affairs is necessary, and NATE is a necessary book, with a perspective that is dangerous to ignore."
--Hubert Adej-Kontoh, BOOKFORUM
"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."
--Ishmael Reed, author of JUICE! and Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media: Return of the Nigger Breakers
"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
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Person
P. Lewis is a notorious Berlin expat whose seditious scribblings have caused hipsters worldwide to shit their pants in fear. He lives by his wits in Berlin.
P. Lewis was born in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1967. He grew up in Adelphi, Maryland. His father, Dr. Stephen E. Henderson, was the author of Understanding the New Black Poetry. From 1985 to 1992 Phil Henderson attended Howard University in Washington D.C. Henderson dropped out a number of times to travel the world during these years, going first to Germany, Holland and Belgium, then France, Italy, Spain, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Greece, Turkey, Syria, and Romania. In late 1987 to early 1988, he lived in Cairo, Egypt.
Upon his return to the United States he edited a small literary magazine called Cafe Noir.
After graduating from Howard University in 1992, Henderson became a member of the Fiction Collective Two, with whom he published his first novel, Life of Death, under a nom-de-plume. Between 1993 and 2004 Henderson published only sporadically in small journals.
In 2006, Phil Henderson, as P. Lewis, won the American Book Award for his second published novel, Nate. The novel took five years to write and went through eight different drafts. It was finished in 1998, yet rejected so relentlessly that Henderson published it under his own imprint, eight years later.
P. Lewis has been based in Berlin since 2002. Since moving to Berlin he has appeared at various venues both in Berlin and the United States, including Tacheles, Literatur-Haus, Schokoladen, English Theatre Berlin (with Lady Gaby's FUEL), Bowery Poetry Club, Curious Fox Bookstore, Amerika-Haus Berlin (with Anthony Baggette), and the Werkstatt der Kultur (with Akira Ando, Han Sato and Rashidii Graffiti).
In 2018 he did a joint podcast with noted Berlin guitarist/soundscapist Sean Derrick Cooper Marquardt, and had completed the first volume of a planned series of books entitled AMERICAN EPITAPH. He has also completed a novel about pre-hipster Berlin (of 20 years past), entitled BERLIN ASYLUM.
