Adam Braver is the author of five novels, most recently Misfit. His books have been selected for the Barnes and Noble Discover New Writers program, Borders' Original Voices series, the IndieNext list, and twice for the Book Sense list, as well as having been translated into Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, and French. He is on faculty and writer-in-residence at Roger Williams University in Bristol, RI. In addition to having taught for the University of New Orleans' Low Residency MFA program, he's also been a regular writer-in-residence at the New York State Summer Writers Institute.
"Braver's collection is a piercing portrait of those who
experienced the Kennedy assassination first-hand." Steve Almond,
author of "My Life in Heavy Metal"
"I had thought that Don DeLillo's "Libra" was the last fictional
word on the JFK assassination, but I was wrong. Like a sublime
actor, Adam Braver inhabits these characters, especially Jacqueline
Kennedy, in a way that seems brave and heartbroken and true. This
is a haunting history play, of private agonies wrenched onto the
public stage."
April Bernard, author of "Swan Electric"
"I would never have thought there was a new way to view a moment so
thoroughly dissected. Turns out there is. Quite an
achievement."
Suzanne Kleid, KQED
""November 22, 1963" is more than an intricately imagined
microhistory of the primary American trauma of the late 20th
century; it's also an affecting portrait of the then First Lady,
simultaneously devastated and resilient as she moves from embodying
her country's image of someone who controls fortune to someone
who's been flattened by it."
Jim Shepard, author of "Like You'd Understand, Anyway"
This extraordinary reconstruction blends fact and imagination with
a subtlety that utterly dissolves the line between public and
private. It's the intimacy, the closeness we come to these (mostly)
well-known protagonists, that is so shocking and moving. Adam
Braver has pulled off quite a feat, realigning all our notions and
expectations of historical fiction.
Phillip Lopate, author of "Waterfront" and "Portrait of my
Body"
"Adam Braver has a wonderfully rich imagination and his grasp of
historical characters and settings is both deep and natural. I
would gladly read anything he writes."
Dan Chaon, author of "You Remind Me of Me" and the National Book
Award Finalist Among the Missing
"With a captivating mix of fact and fiction, Braver chronicles the
events surrounding JFK s assassination to moving effect. The event
is no stranger to the literary world, but Braver s recreation,
owing to small and often previously off-camera details, remains
hauntingly original. Some of these details, like the ones that open
the book and dwell on Jackie s fashion preferences, present a
factual backdrop against which later scenese.g., where Jackie
refuses to remove her blood-splattered pink suittragically play
out. Others, like the way JFK s eyes keep popping open during the
autopsy, underscore the grisly reality of his death. While the
accumulation of small moments gives the book its weightiness, the
stories of people peripherally associated with the assassination
make the book sing; through the experiences of the Texan who sold
the government Kennedy s casket, the mechanic in charge of the
limousine in which Kennedy was shot and numerous others, Braver
reveals the tragedy of a national story that decades later can
still be acutely felt."
"Publisher's Weekly"
"This terse, tense, tough novel is absolutely riveting...Every rose
petal, drop of blood and splatter of brain, every movement and
comment resonates with history as if trapped within a
claustrophobic nightmare. Braver keeps this solemn and somber tone
throughout, his brisk, often lyrical declarative sentences as
direct and translucent as the characters are unable to be."Sam
Coale, "The Providence Journal"
Braver is a terrific writer, an observer of the most acute details;
throughout the book, he traces the subtle interactions of his
characters as they collide and move apart. One of the most moving
interactions here takes place between Jackie and an ambulance
driver named Al Rike as they share cigarettes outside the trauma
room where her husband's body lies...in this tiny glimmer of
connection, whole universes of emotion are uncovered. David Ulin,
"Los Angeles Times Book Review"
"This is fiction of course, but it has the ring of truth...And it
is both painful and fascinating, like rubbernecking at an accident,
to watch. With an audacity of confidence and a sure sense of
fiction's ability to tell eternal truths better than history,
Braver re-creates the day the world changed." Jay Strafford,
Richmond "Times-Dispatch"
"Beautifully written, November 22, 1963 blurs the line between
novel and journalism into something more powerful than eithera
visceral story of an unthinkable event that continues to touch
millions, 45 years later."Michael E. Young, "The Dallas Morning
News"
"Adam Braver's November 22, 1963 focuses on the singular event of
President Kennedy's assassination, fusing fiction and fact from
eyewitnesses and other sources to make for a blazingly original,
brilliantly concretized historical novelfrom the author of Mr.
Lincoln's War.""ELLE"
Braver has achieved more than a skillful retelling of a
particularly morbid moment in American history. With its
collage-like structure and postmodern blend of fact and fiction,
"November 22, 1963" raises fascinating questions about how we
perceive history and the ways in which personal and collective
experience intersect.
Alexis Nelson, "The Oregonian" "A literary piece that blends fact
and fiction, making protagonists of real people and asking very
deep questions about the history, nostalgia and loss."Kel Munger,
"Sacramento News & Review"
"You would think that by now every and any thing that could have
been written about the murder of the president has been said a
dozen times over...Yet this outstanding piece of non-fiction
fiction from Adam Braver manages to do so, and thus makes the book
very much worth the time and money to buy and read." Neil Flowers,
Feminist Review
"Braver s use of multiple viewpoints, engaging personal insight,
and short blocks of prose propel readers through this impressive
example of historical fiction.""Library Journal"
"Adam Braver has done something that might have seemed impossible
not long agohe's created a fresh look at the events of November 22,
1963...Braver has found a way to once again dip into this event
that shattered a nation, and reminds us of how devastating a day it
was without simply re-hashing what others have written before. It's
a bold task for a writer, begin to write about something that every
reader picking the ball up already thinks they know the ending to,
but Braver was more than up to the task."Dan Wickett, Emerging
Writers Network
"This is historical fiction at its best: intensely researched and
beautifully written."Erika D., Book Bargain Reviews
"With a captivating mix of fact and fiction, Braver chronicles the
events surrounding JFK's assassination to moving effect." "Fort
Dodge Today"
"One may feel drawn into the experience of various characters,
while simultaneously treading above some darker, plunging depth. At
other moments, there is only the residue of memory, the granite
presence of fact...[Braver] writes with the seductive concision of
an alternate commission, a tautness that gives authority to
speculation and authenticity to the emotional valences, retrained
as they are." Ron Slate, On the Seawall
"The successes of "November 22, 1963" lie in Braver s ability to
gently and respectfully reside, like a professional surgeon might,
in the stomachs and minds of the people who lived through that
day...Halfway through "November 22, 1963," you realize the novel is
somehow not about JFK at all, but about us. A lesser writer would
have failed at piecing this story together in such a way that we
are okay reliving that monumentally awful day, but in Braver s
hands, we come back to the present wiser versions of ourselves, if
also a bit sadder." PDX Writer Daily
"Braver s novel shows what can be done when a writer delves deeply
into the textures and facts of a historical event about which we
thought we knew everything. Of course we did not; we never know
everything. His curiosity and reconstruction brings to life the
human drama in a way that Oliver Stone and a roomful of conspiracy
buffs never could. Yet the conspiracy buffs get all the press.
Braver s novel deserves a bigger share."Don Graham, "Texas
Observer"
"Spellbinding...a mesmerizing tidal wave of facts, portraits,
episodes, and stories...It's a memorable novel about a day the
nation would like to forget and needs to remember."Barbara
Ardinger, "ForeWord Magazine"
"Adam Braver has crafted a fantastic novel weaving real events with
careful fiction, sweeping us back to Dallas on the day of the JFK
assassination." Elizabeth Lopeman, "Eugene Magazine"
"[Braver] doesn't overreach. Instead, he recounts that horrible day
in November with no small measure of empathy, 'obliterating a
moment' in his own words and taking it back to a place 'where even
in violence the world seemed a little softer.'"the "San Diego
Union-Tribune"
..".Braver shows himself to be a writer of acute judgment and
talent. The degree of attention paid by the author to the
micro-level of history lends his novel a humanity and perspective
that had, I feared, been drained from popular representations of
the assassination." Karl Whitney, "3: AM Magazine"
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