Discovering her brother has committed suicide, a successful yet lonely author with a hit dystopian novel begins responding to texts as her late brother on her phone and becomes more and more untethered from reality. - (Baker & Taylor)

Discovering her brother has committed suicide, a successful yet lonely author with a hit dystopian novel begins responding to texts as her late brother on her phone and becomes more and more untethered from reality. 75,000 first printing. - (Baker & Taylor)

A Finalist for the 2025 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction. Longlisted for the 2025 PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and the 2025 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award. A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 2024. One of NPR's 2024 Books We Love. Longlisted for the 2024 Joyce Carol Oates Prize.

“Told by machines from the future, Blackburn’s idiosyncratic grief novel is as freshly devastating as they come.” —The New York Times Book Review

“You can try bracing yourself for the ride this story takes you on, but it’s best to just surrender. Your wig is going to fall off no matter what you do.” —Saeed Jones, author of How We Fight for Our Lives

Coral is the first person to discover the body of her brother, Jay, in the wake of his suicide. There’s no note, only a drably furnished bachelor pad in Long Beach, California, and a cell phone with a handful of numbers in it. Coral pockets the phone. And then she starts responding to texts as her dead brother.

Over the course of one week, Coral, the successful yet lonely author of a hit dystopian novel, Wildfire, becomes increasingly untethered from reality. Blindsided by grief and operating with reck­less determination, she doubles—and triples—down on posing as her brother, risking not only her sanity but also her relationship with her precocious niece, Khadija. As Coral’s swirl of lies closes in on her, the quirky and mysterious alien world of Wildfire becomes entangled with her own reality, in the pro­cess pushing long-buried memories, traumas, and secrets dangerously into the present.

A form-shifting and soul-crunching chronicle of grief and crisis, Venita Blackburn’s debut novel, Dead in Long Beach, California, is a fleet-footed marvel of self-discovery and storytelling that explores the depths of humankind’s capacity for harm and healing. With the daring, often hilarious imagination that made her an acclaimed short-fiction innovator, Blackburn crafts a layered, page-turning reckoning with what it means to be alive, dead, and somewhere in between.

Venita Blackburn is the author of the story collections Black Jesus and Other Superheroes, which won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize and was a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, and How to Wrestle a Girl, which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction and the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker online, The Paris Review, Pleiades, Bat City Review, and American Short Fiction. She is a faculty member in the creative writing program at Fresno State University and is the founder and president of Live, Write, an organization devoted to offering free creative writing workshops for communities of color. She lives in Fresno, California. - (McMillan Palgrave)

Booklist Reviews

Blackburn's (How to Wrestle a Girl, 2021) first novel is an engaging and original portrait of a woman on the verge. Coral is a Black woman, famous enough to draw a crowd at Comic Con for her graphic novel, Wildfire. When she goes to visit her brother, Jay, she finds he has died by suicide. After calling the EMTs, she starts using Jay's phone to respond, as him, to text messages, mostly from his daughter Khadija. Over the next week, Coral creates a social media account for Jay, sets up a date with his newish girlfriend, and slowly unravels, although she continues going to work and meeting women over a dating app—enough to keep up the appearance of sanity. Interspersed are excerpts from the postapocalyptic Wildfire and flashbacks to Coral's childhood, many of them narrated by a collective that may be from the graphic novel or from Coral's own mind as she loses her grip on reality. Blackburn is formidable, her writing is experimental in intriguing and meaningful ways, and this is another winner. Copyright 2023 Booklist Reviews.

Library Journal Reviews

When Coral discovers her brother Jay dead by suicide in his shabby California apartment, she's sufficiently undone by grief to do something unwise; she grabs his phone and starts responding to his texts as if he were still alive. Then she must keep up the charade. A debut novel following two story collections, including Black Jesus and Other Superheroes, an NYPL Young Lions finalist. Prepub Alert. Copyright 2023 Library Journal

Library Journal Reviews

Coral lives in a world teetering on the brink of destruction. Young people have been handed problems that are impossible to fix in an unsustainable society, and resentment is their general attitude. Some opt out via suicide; others turn to superhero fiction for solace. Coral writes a superhero comic book series to answer the demand, but she is also part of the disillusioned and anxious generation, living at least partially in a fabricated mental world. Then she finds her brother Jay dead in his apartment only minutes after she spoke to him on the phone. While she deals with police, coroners, and burial, she decides to keep Jay alive in the virtual world. She responds to his phone messages as if he is alive; she creates a Facebook page and persona for him; she tells no one that he is dead, not even his daughter. After an excruciating week, she finally comes to grips with her loss. Blackburn sharply captures the longing of the younger generation for a better world, as the angst and disconnect projected via Coral is visceral. VERDICT Readers interested in the current state of the world and the consequences of living in it will find this book both difficult and fascinating.—Joanna M. Burkhardt