A. G. Lombardo is a native Angeleno who teaches at a Los Angeles public high school. Graffiti Palace is his debut novel.
A performative resistance to authority, channeling the multiple
contrasting voices and stories of Los Angeles into a mural
exploding with color and contradictions. --Los Angeles Review of
Books
"Graffiti Palace is stunning--a blend of Joe Ide's IQ detective
novels, Thomas Pynchon, Jonathan Lethem's Chronic City, and Haruki
Murakami's 1Q84." --Chicago Review of Books [A] bravura
improvisation on The Odyssey . . . Lombardo tosses off Odyssey
markers and channels Thomas Pynchon and Colson Whitehead . . .
Lombardo has created an exuberantly cartoonish, incisive, and
suspenseful tale of an erupting city and an earnest "street
scholar" intent on making us "see the writing on the walls."
--Donna Seaman, Booklist "This debut novel is another unexpected
wild ride, one with an ambitious and imaginative premise... [and a]
rhythmic urgency and inventiveness propelling the reader forward
through protagonist Americo Monk's dark night." --Los Angeles Daily
News
[Lombardo's] use of supernatural imagery that clouds the mind
invokes a nightmare landscape for the people in it, something so
horrible it begs not to be real. --The Coil (on Medium) In his
debut novel, Lombardo, who flashes impressive stylistic chops
throughout, seems to be aiming for his own jazz-inflected version
of a Joycean "night town" ramble infused with history, urban
legend, dark comedy, and mythological tropes. --Kirkus "Reading
Graffiti Palace, I half wondered if the Watts Riots had been staged
all those years ago just so A.G. Lombardo could write a novel about
it. This is a book that's as crazy and unpredictable as an urban
uprising; it's a phantasmagoric journey, written in precise and
haunting prose, through a wounded and defiant city called Los
Angeles." --Héctor Tobar, author of The Barbarian Nurseries and
Deep Down Dark "What an audacious debut: a novel that reframes The
Odyssey as a journey across Los Angeles during the Watts Riots.
Beautiful, hard-edged, challenging, and unexpected, Graffiti Palace
recalls the linguistic exuberance of Thomas Pynchon while evoking
the surreal landscape of a city under siege. At the same time, it
never loses sight of the essential human drama--the desire, despite
(or because of) everything that's happening, to find a passage
home." --David Ulin, author of Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with
Los Angeles and editor of Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology
"An electrifying new voice in American fiction. A. G. Lombardo's
wildly entertaining debut reimagines the 1965 Watts Riots as an
Homeric journey through rioting cops, burning streets, CIA
conspiracies, and the potentially fatal semiotics of race and
oppression in America. Along the way, we also run into Godzilla,
Elijah Muhammad, the greatest taggers in the history of Los Angeles
freeway art, and a deadly fortune cookie war. Graffiti Palace is a
stunning arrival, easily the most exciting book of the year."
--Evan Wright, author of Generation Kill
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