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| T. Geronimo Johnson (photo: Elizabeth Cowan) |
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Born and raised in the American South, T. Geronimo Johnson is the author of Welcome to Braggsville, longlisted for the National Book Award and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence; and Hold It 'Til It Hurts, a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. He won the inaugural Joyce Carol Oates Prize, the Rome Prize, the Ernest J. Gaines Award, and the William Saroyan International Prize, received his M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and has held Wallace Stegner and Iowa Arts fellowships. His novel The Occidental Book of the Dead (Morrow, October 6, 2026) is a darkly funny, formally inventive, decades-spanning literary crime masterpiece that skewers and vividly evokes the complexities of the South and centers on a Black cop in an Atlanta precinct.
Handsell readers your book:
It's a love story inside of a love story inside of a love story, a novel about both romantic and fraternal devotion, and about childhood and parenthood. A police officer desperate to become a father finds that his every attempt to do the right thing sparks horrific unintended consequences that destroy the lives of everyone around him, leaving several people dead.
On your nightstand now:
The Hollow Man by John Dickson Carr, The Lumumba Plot by Stuart A. Reid, The Shape of Water by Andrea Camilleri, The Free-lance Pallbearers by Ishmael Reed, Ten Little Niggers by Agatha Christie, The Whistler by John Grisham, Trust Exercise by Susan Choi, and U.S.A. by John Dos Passos.
Favorite book when you were a child:
Every book with Greek mythology. Racy stuff.
Your top five authors:
Only five? This constitutes entrapment. Did Damocles himself write this million-dollar question? I choose to phone a friend-in-spirit by the name of Danger Mouse. His seminal The Grey Album is hereby invoked as my spirit guide. A potential top five mash-up:
1. Gabriel García Morrison (particularly The Chronicle of the Bluest Eye Foretold)
2. James "Saramago" Baldwin (who doesn't love All the Names on the Mountain?)
3. Flann "Borges" O'Brien (I recommend his mind-bending account of Pierre Menard at Swim-Two-Birds)
4. Italo "Barry" Calvino (The Invisible City Bohane)
5. Patrick "Dostoyevsky" Chamoiseau (Notes from Texaco)
Books you're an evangelist for:
The Thought Gang by Tibor Fischer. Coming Through Slaughter by Michael Ondaatje. Together they form a literary speedball.
Book you hid from your parents:
Grade book.
Book that changed your life:
The book most recently read.
Every book I encounter changes me. Henry James wrote in "The Art of Fiction" that writers must "try be one of those on whom nothing is lost." This is good advice for life overall. It's certainly good advice for reading. How can I read a book without being aware that I'm spending time with the mind of another human? How can I read a book and not be curious about the author's every decision great and small? It matters not whether I agree. It matters not whether I "like" the book. It matters not whether it's my genre. It matters not whether I feel I've read a similar story before. Each book is another window on the world. (I'll reexamine this notion as AI-authored texts become more prevalent.)
But rules are meant to be followed and I haven't answered the question. One book that I'd recommend is not literature at all. It's a book about money. An esteemed author once said that the key to success for a writer is "low overhead." I accordingly recommend Your Money or Your Life by Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez. It's about the difference between making a living and making a life. It's about knowing your "real wages." It's about financial independence. What could be more important to a writer (or any artist) (or anybody who works for a living)?
Favorite line from a book:
One of my favorite dishes is the famed turducken. Those familiar with that delicacy will understand my strategy in answering this question. I opt for a selection from Édouard Glissant found inside a translator's note found inside a novel entitled Slave Old Man by Patrick Chamoiseau:
"The past, our endured past, which is not yet history for us, is yet here tormenting us. The writer's task is to explore this obsessive pain, to 'reveal' it constantly in the here and now."
Runner up: "Anger is better." --Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye.
Five books you'll never part with:
I've moved so frequently that no book has a reserved seat on the ark. As for books that continue to resonate: The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald, City of Bohane by Kevin Barry, The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy, Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison. You will find in this list exemplars of the writer's cardinal virtues: inquisitiveness, probity, veracity, and revelation.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
The Quiet American by Graham Greene for the ending. Greene convincingly renders hauntingly tragic remorse. He blends the personal and the political perfectly.
Another question you'd like to answer:
What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do? --Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
Answer: Everything.