Rage Is Back

October 1, 2012
In this slick, outlandish novel by bestselling author Mansbach (Go the F**k to Sleep), 18-year-old biracial Kilroy Dondi Vance, a “lightskinned cat,” is expelled from a New York City private academy for peddling hydroponic marijuana. Sixteen years earlier, in 1989, Dondi’s white father, Billy Rage, a popular graffiti artist, had a violent encounter with NYPD’s Vandal Squad, led by Anastacio Bracken, who caught Billy and others spray-painting in the subway and, during the pursuit, gunned down his friend Amuse. After Bracken covered up Amuse’s murder, Billy went on “the sickest run,” spraying graffiti accusing Bracken of killing Amuse all over the city, with Dondi’s African-American mom Karen, herself a graffiti artist, hoping Billy would “stop and grieve.” After Bracken was appointed the MTA’s chief of security, he declared war on the “sociopath” Billy, who fled to Mexico. Now, in 2005, Dondi finds Billy back in town in bad shape after a suicide attempt and years spent in the Amazon becoming a shaman, with the help of numerous psychedelic drugs. Bracken is more powerful than ever, and a mayoral candidate, and Billy resolves to bring him down via a new graffiti campaign. Though Dondi’s voice, a combination of sophistication and raw urban slang, feels at time forced, Mansbach’s novel is a fun and exciting read. Agent: Richard Abate, 3 Arts Entertainment.

November 1, 2012
In a postmodernist world of NYC graffiti artists driven underground, war is an act of art. Mansbach (Seriously, Just Go To Sleep, 2012, etc.) returns to fictionalizing the untidy corners of the New York City culture wars. Our admittedly unreliable narrator is Dondi Vance, a biracial scholarship student and part-time hydro dealer. He's just been dumped by Kirsten, aka "The Uptown Girl," who is furious that Dondi's been expelled from "Whoopty Whoo Ivy League We's A Comin' Academy." He's also the product of mad genes, having been raised by his mother, Karen, after his papa, Billy Rage, the city's most infamous graffiti artist, vanished in 1989 after his best friend's murder. Now everyone on the scene is clashing with Billy's nemesis, corrupt transit authority bureaucrat Anastacio Bracken. As a narrator, Dondi wields a fantastic but implausible voice that is electric with rhythm, riddled with bullshit and wise beyond its years. One second, he has a professorial understanding of street culture; the next, he's discovering a time warp in a tenement building. We get a good example of Dondi's attitude when Billy returns from psychotropic exile in Mexico. "When you're responsible for somebody with whom you've got so much unresolved shit, you've either gotta find the inner strength to make each act a tiny gesture of forgiveness, or else spend every stagnant, housebound hour pulsing with resentment." Dondi's story proves thrilling: The book is peppered with grandfatherly revolutionaries, slang-slinging young bloods and an army of paint-wielding ninjas who unite with military precision on an ambitious plan to graffiti-bomb every single train car on the MTA. A love letter dripping with 1980s nostalgia that talks and talks and talks the talk.

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August 1, 2012

Mansbach was minding his own business as a respected novelist, poet, and essayist when he pulled an extraordinary coup by writing the No. 1 New York Times best-selling Go the F**k To Sleep. Biracial Brooklynite Kilroy Dondi Vance, pot dealer and prep school scholarship student, is the son of renowned graffiti writer Billy Rage--back in town to challenge his old nemesis, Metropolitan Transit Authority chief Anastacio Bracken, who's running for mayor.

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 1, 2012
From the author of the 2011 cult favorite, Go the F**k to Sleep, comes a gritty, fast-paced novel about the underground graffiti world in New York City. The tale hits the ground running and never stops, which can be attributed to the witty voice of its mixed-race and mixed-up narrator, Kilroy Dondi Vance. After Dondi is reunited with his father, who disappeared when he was a child, he comes to discover that this dreadlocked bum was once the leader of a graffiti gang that ruled the subway tunnels and marked the city during the 1980s. A scandal with the MTA police chief, Anastasio Bracken, sent Dondi's father, Billy Rage, underground; but now that Bracken is running for mayor, Rage has come back to seek revenge. Mansbach's sharp and edgy style carries this fresh story in and out of subway tunnels and through the grimiest neighborhoods of New York, bringing the New York of now and then together in full relief.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)