It’s just a few pages into Marlon James’ A Brief History of Seven Killings that a boy, one of the book’s many narrators, watches his parents rather viciously slaughtered, and things get grimier from there. James was the first Jamaican author to win the prestigious Man Booker prize for his sprawling novel, an epic involving both the CIA and a 1976 assassination attempt on Bob Marley. (There’s a helpful list of characters at the front of the book, one which runs for several pages.) Now a Minneapolis loft-dweller, James wraps up this semester’s public Writers on Writing series at Brown.
Marlon James
