All Joe Knight: A Novel

Description

In the audacious and lyrical debut novel All Joe Knight, longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, critically acclaimed writer Kevin Morris cements his place as a bold new voice in American literature. 1961. Orphaned before his first birthday, Joe Knight begins life as a blank slate. Taken in by an aunt in a blue-collar Philadelphia suburb, Joe finds a sense of belonging with a scrappy group of kids who come together on the basketball court and evolve into the Fallcrest High School team-the kind of team that comes around once in a generation. All these kids want is to make it to the Palestra, Philadelphia's cathedral of college basketball. Fast-forward thirty years: Joe is newly divorced with a young daughter. Ever since selling the ad firm he built from the ground up for millions, he's been wiling away his time at a local business school and at strip clubs. Then he hears from Chris Scully, a former Fallcrest teammate who is now district attorney. The Justice Department is sniffing around the deal that made Joe rich-a deal he cut every member of the basketball team into, except for Scully. As the details about Joe's possible transgressions are unreeled, he is forced to face the emptiness inside himself and a secret that has tormented him for decades.

Kevin Morris is the author of the acclaimed story collection White Man's Problems and has written for the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, and Filmmaker magazine. He produced the highly regarded documentary Hands on a Hardbody and was a coproducer and Tony Award winner for The Book of Mormon.

Praise for All Joe Knight: Longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize An Amazon Best Book of the Month in Literature & Fiction for December 2016 "Morris is a natural storyteller . . . the line-by-line humanness is the absolute killer heart of this brilliant first novel."-Terry McDonell, author of The Accidental Life"A remarkable and agonizing portrayal of a middle-aged man who doesn't know what's become of his life, and doesn't seem to care."-Esquire "[A] two-fisted debut novel . . . Joe is John Updike's Rabbit Angstrom revised for the Trump era-more profane and straight-talking . . . Like a corner-bar Montaigne, Joe has an opinion on just about everything, from the wealthy to Bob Dylan to the 1974 Philadelphia Flyers to women's breasts . . . Joe is a boor, but Morris gives him an awareness of that boorishness, a complex past, and a gift for sturdy, well-turned observations . . . And Morris . . . has put a spotlight on a lower middle class that gets little attention in contemporary fiction, regardless of race . . .One of the graces of fiction is that an effective character doesn't have to be likable. Morris' novel is a surprisingly full portrait of one man who exemplifies the notion."-USA Today, 3/4 stars "An engaging debut novel. Joe Knight . . . narrates in a gritty, defiant, sardonic voice that's one of the work's greatest strengths . . . A moving portrait of a lost soul in modern America, for all readers of literary fiction."-Library Journal (starred review) "Suspenseful . . . Morris vividly evokes the dynamics among the boys-and later the disillusioned men-who came of age on the margins of a city in decline, and in the shadow of great colonial founding fathers."-National Book Review "Kevin Morris goes for a slam dunk in his debut novel, All Joe Knight."-Vanity Fair Hot Type "Morris's novel deftly shows that the frustrations of a stunted middle-aged man are evocative terrain." Publishers Weekly "An in your face account of friends, family, and Philly that I enjoyed all Knight long."-My Dad Reads Too Many Books