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American Bastard is a lyrical inquiry into the life of being a bastard, sandblasting the myth of the “chosen baby.”
About the author
Jan Beatty’s sixth book, The Body Wars (2020), was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Books include Jackknife: New and Collected Poems (2018 Paterson Prize) named by Sandra Cisneros on LitHub as her favorite book of 2019. Awards include the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, Discovery/The Nation Prize finalist, Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, $10,000 Artists Grant from the Pittsburgh Foundation, and a $15,000 Creative Achievement Award in Literature from the Heinz Foundation. She directs creative writing and the Madwomen in the Attic Workshops at Carlow University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and is Distinguished Writer in Residence in the MFA program.
Summary
American Bastard is a lyrical inquiry into the life of being a bastard, sandblasting the myth of the “chosen baby.”
Additional text
American Bastard dares and succeeds at reimaging and redefining memoir as a genre where stream of consciousness meets essay, meets magical realism, meets reportage, meets poetry to create an epic mosaic only possible through the literary genius of Jan Beatty. And as if that weren’t enough, an enthralling yet gracious exposé about adoption that confronts and educates us through a voice that is at times tender and broken, at times angry and fierce, but always unflinchingly honest with herself, the people in her life, and her readers. —Richard Blanco, author of The Prince of Los Cocuyos: A Miami Memoir
“I don’t think I’ve ever read a
book like this one. I hadn’t known some live haunted by their own blood ghosts.
It will be medicine for those wounded by their own births and illuminating for
anyone who thought they understood notions of home and kin. It’s as if Beatty’s
lived homesick for herself. American
Bastard is as brutal and beautiful as Beatty’s poetry. A surgery of the
self. Precise and invasive, exploratory and celebratory, debilitating and
transformational.” —Sandra Cisneros, author of The House on Mango Street and A House of My Own: Stories from My Life
Jan Beatty’s American Bastard starts with a
threat—with razorlike prose, she backs you up against the wall of your naïve
assumptions. A monumental work of wild innovative storytelling, wholly
original, American Bastard would be
unbearable in its pain were it not rendered with such exquisite craft and
beauty. As a reader, you’re either in or out; I suggest you stay in for one of
the decade’s premier memoirs. —Sapphire, author of Push and The Kid
American Bastard has it all: dazzling craft, a resonant story,
and an unflinching honesty, the essential ingredient transforming a work into a
work of art. This deep dive into the emotional world of an adoptee and her
struggle to find the missing and unresolved parts of herself left behind on the
day of her adoption is at once disturbing and hypnotic. American Bastard
is a balancing act, a hybrid work blending prose and poetry that threatens to
unravel on the page as the author searches for her history, her identity, and
her place in the world. —Nikki Moustaki, author of The Bird Market of Paris
