Screw, Marry, or Kill

Maris Kreizman is the host of The Maris Review, a literary podcast from LitHub. She is the creator of Slaughterhouse 90210, a blog and book (Flatiron Books, 2015) that celebrates the intersection of her two great loves--literature and pop culture. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, BuzzFeed, Vulture, and more. A former book editor, Maris takes special pleasure in critiquing her own writing.

Marlon James was born in Jamaica in 1970. His novel A Brief History of Seven Killings won the 2015 Man Booker Prize. It also won the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature for fiction, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for fiction, and the Minnesota Book Award. James is also the author of The Book of Night Women, which won the 2010 Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Minnesota Book Award. In Black Leopard, Red Wolf (Riverhead Books), a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction, myth, fantasy, and history come together to explore what happens when a mercenary is hired to find a missing child. Tracker is known far and wide for his skills as a hunter: "He has a nose," people say. Engaged to track down a mysterious boy who disappeared three years earlier, Tracker breaks his own rule of always working alone when he finds himself part of a group that comes together to search for the boy. As Tracker follows the boy's scent--from one ancient city to another; into dense forests and across deep rivers--he and the band are set upon by creatures intent on destroying them. Drawing from African history and mythology and his own rich imagination, Marlon James has written a novel unlike anything that's come before it: a saga of breathtaking adventure that's also an ambitious, involving read. Black Leopard, Red Wolf is both surprising and profound as it explores the fundamentals of truth, the limits of power, and our need to understand them both.