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A Novel
by Doug Jones
In this powerful debut reminiscent of Barry Jenkins's Moonlight, two men in Atlanta reconcile their human dignity against the price of their professional ambitions working for a real estate development company displacing Black residents in preparation for the 1996 Olympics.
Daily interactions between Jacob and Daniel are a powder keg of sexual tension and uncertainty. A recent Morehouse graduate and Brooklyn transplant, Jacob fears that accepting the truth of his sexuality will disappoint the hopes his parents have for him to lead a respectable life. Grieving the death of his mother while searching for answers about a father he has never known, Daniel, an Atlanta native, has resigned himself to the reality that men who love men don't have happy endings.
When Jacob meets Sherman, a social worker fighting for one of the families being displaced by the project, he must decide if rejecting security is worth the risk of embracing the unknown. In the midst of navigating his grief, and volatile relationship with Jacob, Daniel learns of his father's identity. Though meeting his father could provide Daniel with the closure he has always sought, the distance between what Daniel wants and what he's willing to do for it remains a question only he can answer.
"[R]esonant if underdeveloped...Jones takes a deep dive into the effects of housing inequality on the city's Black community, and he offers many perceptive insights into Black male sexuality...Unfortunately, as the men's story lines converge, extensive flashbacks and narrative digressions reveal too little, particularly about Daniel, leaving the novel feeling unbalanced. Still, Jones is a writer worth keeping tabs on." —Publishers Weekly
"An ambitious and heartfelt debut." —Kirkus Reviews
"Gorgeously compassionate, this debut is as sharp as our past—and bright as our future." —Tayari Jones, New York Times bestselling author of An American Marriage
"A rare and powerful work that reshapes the canon and expands our collective imagination. Jones knows Black queer characters deserve to take up boundless space on the page and in our imaginations. I am changed after reading his debut, and I know you will be too." —Darnell Moore, Lambda Literary Award-winning author of No Ashes in the Fire
This information about The Fantasies of Future Things was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Douglas E. Jones graduated from Morehouse College and received an MFA from Columbia University. In 2007, he was an inaugural Lambda Literary Fellow at American Jewish University, where he studied with Dorothy Allison. His nonfiction has been included in the anthology Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social and Political Black Literature & Art and his poetry has been published in Sojourner: Black Gay Voices in the Age of AIDS. Doug is a full-time, licensed real estate agent in Brooklyn, New York, and Atlanta, Georgia. He lives in Atlanta. The Fantasies of Future Things is his debut novel.
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