“Messiahs seems to take place in our dreams . . . It is a painfully told tale, fearless in its storytelling, in that it marries austerity with a sensuousness depicting lust, aloneness, and betrayal . . .The radical nature of the book is its shifting narrative, which meanders through minds, prisons, letters, and storms, fiercely navigating a society that is unnervingly similar to our own. It is as quiet and dramatic as silent cinema . . . It is like a wild plunge down an undammed river: sometimes there are peaceful, calm eddies, but rarely; the fever dream barely releases its grip through the rapids until you close the last page, and even then you dream of it for days.”
—American Book Review
“Marc Anthony Richardson’s novel has a nightmare impact, a gathering heartbreak...Messiahs often upsets expectation, using its imaginative premise as more than a platform for critiquing our broken justice system....typical of the entire unfolding tapestry, a marvel of close stitching, with glimmers you feel in your spine.”
—John Domini, The Brooklyn Rail, author of The Archeology of a Good Ragù and The Color Inside a Melon
“Messiahs is a fever dream of storytelling. It explores racism and interracial conflict, the deadly prison industrial complex, climate emergency, social death, and more in prose that unfurls like waves of sound. Bleak, though not without hope, challenging, though with numerous rewards along the way, innovative from start to finish, Messiahs is a marvel.”
—John Keene, MacArthur Fellow and author of Annotations and Counternarratives
“In Messiahs, Marc Anthony Richardson gives us an innovative, intelligent, and insightful take on several American obsessions, including punishment, incarceration, and the death penalty. As much as this layered narrative presents a warning about things to come, it also offers a profound examination of rebirth, redemption, second-acts. All in all an unnerving, uncanny, and challenging read on many levels, but well worth the effort.”
—Jeffery Renard Allen, Guggenheim Fellow and author of Rails Under My Back and Song of the Shank
“Marc Anthony Richardson's extraordinary novel Messiahs explores the intimate cost of incarceration through a lens you’ve never seen before, and is also about love, race, erotic bonds, and the mysteries of human consciousness in an unjust world. Set in a possible near future in which prisons accept ‘proxies’ for capital punishment, this novel probes the depths, and is written with exquisite lyricism and unrelenting grace.”
—Carolina De Robertis, National Endowment for the Arts Fellow and author of Cantoras and The President and the Frog
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