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M A R C
A N T H O N Y
R I C H A R D S O N

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Forthcoming

THE SERPENT
WILL EAT WHATEVER IS IN THE BELLY OF
THE BEAST
(
Deep Vellum/Dalkey Archive Press)

The Serpent Will Eat Whatever is in the Belly of the Beast is a mystical allegory, a novelistic poem, and a theatrical caché of case studies told in the second person by the dead, bleeding into each other like watercolors, and interspersed by the voices and the thoughts of each actor: you. On stage, a cabal of seven vigilantes, victims of police violence, orchestrate a strange and insidious agenda, as pangs of conscience compel one to peek behind the curtain.

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Recent Release

M E S S I A H S
(
FC2/University of Alabama Press)

A fiercely ecstatic tale of betrayal and self-sacrifice 

Messiahs centers on two nameless lovers, a woman of east Asian descent and a former state prisoner, a black man who volunteered incarceration on behalf of his falsely convicted nephew, yet was “exonerated” after more than two years on death row. In this dystopian America, one can assume a relative’s capital sentence as an act of holy reform—“the proxy initiative,” patterned after the Passion.  

The lovers begin their affair by exchanging letters, and after his release, they withdraw to a remote cabin during a torrential winter, haunted by their respective past tragedies. Savagely ostracized by her family for years, the woman is asked by her mother to take the proxy initiative for her brother—creating a conflict she cannot bear to share with her lover. Comprised of ten poetic paragraphs, Messiahs’ rigorous style and sustained intensity equals agony and ecstasy.

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Messiahs is a fever dream of storytelling. It explores racism and interracial conflict, the deadly prison industrial complex, climate emergency, social death, and more in prose that unfurls like waves of sound. Bleak, though not without hope, challenging, though with numerous rewards along the way, innovative from start to finish, Messiahs is a marvel.

John Keene

National Book Award Winner,

MacArthur Fellow, and author of Punks and Counternarratives

Praise & Reviews

In Messiahs, Marc Anthony Richardson gives us an innovative, intelligent, and insightful take on several American obsessions, including punishment, incarceration, and the death penalty. As much as this layered narrative presents a warning about things to come, it also offers a profound examination of rebirth, redemption, second acts. All in all an unnerving, uncanny, and challenging read on many levels, but well worth the effort.

Jeffery Renard Allen

Guggenheim Fellow and author of

Rails Under My Back and Song of the Shank

Marc Anthony Richardson’s novel has a nightmare impact, a gathering heartbreak . . . Messiahs often upsets expectation, using its imaginative premise as more than a platform for critiquing our broken justice system . . . typical of the entire unfolding tapestry, a marvel of close stitching, with glimmers you feel in your spine.

John Domini

reviewer for The Brooklyn Rail and author of The Archeology of a Good Ragù and The Color Inside a Melon

Appearances

Upcoming Appearances

Green Apple Books (online)

In conversation with Carolina De Robertis

San Francisco, CA

6 pm PST / 9 pm EST

August 25, 2021

Mills College Contemporary Writers Series (online)

Oakland, CA

5 pm PST / 8 pm EST

September 17, 2021

Fiction Collection Two (FC2) Reading Series (online)

with JoAnna Novak and Yannick Murphy

5 pm PST / 8 pm EST

September 23, 2021

Kelly Writers House (in-person)

University of Pennsylvania 

Opening reading by Vi Khi Nao

Philadelphia, PA

6 pm EST

October 5, 2021

Bard College/Conjunctions (in-person)

Innovative Contemporary Fiction Reading Series

Annandale-On-Hudson, NY

6:30 pm EST

October 18, 2021

Association of Writers & Writing Programs  (in-person)

Philly X 5: Set to Prose

Pennsylvania Convention Center

Philadelphia, PA

10:35 am EST (US)

March 26, 2022

Rhodes University (online)

Mellon Scholar-in-Residence Reading/Lecture

Grahamstown, South Africa

7:30 pm SAST (South Africa); 1:30 pm EST (US)

June 2, 2022

Marc Anthony Richardson

Marc Anthony Richardson is the author of Messiahs and Year of the Rat, winner of an American Book Award and a Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize. His forthcoming third novel, The Serpent Will Eat Whatever is in the Belly of the Beast, won a Creative Capital Award. He also received grants from PEN America and the Sachs Program, a fellowship from the Hurston/Wright foundation, and residencies from the Vermont Studio Center, Art Omi, and Rhodes University in South Africa. He teaches creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania.

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