Uh-oh, it looks like your Internet Explorer is out of date.
For a better shopping experience, please upgrade now.
Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations
A bold, wry, and intimate graphic memoir about American identity, interracial families, and the realities that divide us, from the acclaimed author of*The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing.
“By turns hilarious and heart-rending, it's exactly the book America needs at this moment.”-Celeste Ng “How brown is too brown?” “Can Indians be racist?” “What does real love between really different people look like?”
Like many six-year-olds, Mira Jacob's half-Jewish, half-Indian son, Z, has questions about*everything. At first they are innocuous enough, but as tensions from the 2016 election spread from the media into his own family, they become much, much more complicated. Trying to answer him honestly, Mira has to think back to where she's gotten her own answers: her most formative conversations about race, color, sexuality, and, of course, love.* * Written with humor and vulnerability, this deeply relatable graphic memoir, adapted for audio, is a love letter to the art of conversation-and to the hope that hovers in our most difficult questions.
Read by:*Vikas Adam, Shiromi Arserio,*McCartney Birdwell,*Donte Bonner, Bill Cheng, Nicole Counts, Margaret Dunham, Chris Edmund, Alison Fraser,*Cecila Flores, Kaitlyn Greenridge, Alison Hart, Chris Jackson, Soneela Nankani, Victory Matsui, Kivlighan de Montebello, Meera Nair, Lorna Raver, Rajiv Surendra, Oliver Wyman, and an ensemble cast
Advance praise for Good Talk
“[A] breezy but poignant graphic memoir that takes on racism, love, and the election of President Trump. . . . The collage effect creates an odd, immediate intimacy. [Mira Jacob] employs pages of narrative prose sparingly but hauntingly. . . . The `talks' Jacob relates are painful, often hilarious, and sometimes absurd, but her memoir makes a fierce case for continuing to have them.”-Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“A beautiful and eye-opening account of what it means to mother a brown boy and what it means to live in this country post-9/11, as a person of color, as a woman, as an artist . . .*In Jacob's brilliant hands, we are gifted with a narrative that is sometimes hysterically funny, always honest, and ultimately healing.”-Jacqueline Woodson, National Book Award-winning author of*Another Brooklyn
“Mira Jacob just made me toss everything I thought was possible in a book-as-art-object into the garbage. Her new book changes everything.”-Kiese Laymon,*New York Times bestselling author of*Heavy
1129246638
Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations
A bold, wry, and intimate graphic memoir about American identity, interracial families, and the realities that divide us, from the acclaimed author of*The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing.
“By turns hilarious and heart-rending, it's exactly the book America needs at this moment.”-Celeste Ng “How brown is too brown?” “Can Indians be racist?” “What does real love between really different people look like?”
Like many six-year-olds, Mira Jacob's half-Jewish, half-Indian son, Z, has questions about*everything. At first they are innocuous enough, but as tensions from the 2016 election spread from the media into his own family, they become much, much more complicated. Trying to answer him honestly, Mira has to think back to where she's gotten her own answers: her most formative conversations about race, color, sexuality, and, of course, love.* * Written with humor and vulnerability, this deeply relatable graphic memoir, adapted for audio, is a love letter to the art of conversation-and to the hope that hovers in our most difficult questions.
Read by:*Vikas Adam, Shiromi Arserio,*McCartney Birdwell,*Donte Bonner, Bill Cheng, Nicole Counts, Margaret Dunham, Chris Edmund, Alison Fraser,*Cecila Flores, Kaitlyn Greenridge, Alison Hart, Chris Jackson, Soneela Nankani, Victory Matsui, Kivlighan de Montebello, Meera Nair, Lorna Raver, Rajiv Surendra, Oliver Wyman, and an ensemble cast
Advance praise for Good Talk
“[A] breezy but poignant graphic memoir that takes on racism, love, and the election of President Trump. . . . The collage effect creates an odd, immediate intimacy. [Mira Jacob] employs pages of narrative prose sparingly but hauntingly. . . . The `talks' Jacob relates are painful, often hilarious, and sometimes absurd, but her memoir makes a fierce case for continuing to have them.”-Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“A beautiful and eye-opening account of what it means to mother a brown boy and what it means to live in this country post-9/11, as a person of color, as a woman, as an artist . . .*In Jacob's brilliant hands, we are gifted with a narrative that is sometimes hysterically funny, always honest, and ultimately healing.”-Jacqueline Woodson, National Book Award-winning author of*Another Brooklyn
“Mira Jacob just made me toss everything I thought was possible in a book-as-art-object into the garbage. Her new book changes everything.”-Kiese Laymon,*New York Times bestselling author of*Heavy
A bold, wry, and intimate graphic memoir about American identity, interracial families, and the realities that divide us, from the acclaimed author of*The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing.
“By turns hilarious and heart-rending, it's exactly the book America needs at this moment.”-Celeste Ng “How brown is too brown?” “Can Indians be racist?” “What does real love between really different people look like?”
Like many six-year-olds, Mira Jacob's half-Jewish, half-Indian son, Z, has questions about*everything. At first they are innocuous enough, but as tensions from the 2016 election spread from the media into his own family, they become much, much more complicated. Trying to answer him honestly, Mira has to think back to where she's gotten her own answers: her most formative conversations about race, color, sexuality, and, of course, love.* * Written with humor and vulnerability, this deeply relatable graphic memoir, adapted for audio, is a love letter to the art of conversation-and to the hope that hovers in our most difficult questions.
Read by:*Vikas Adam, Shiromi Arserio,*McCartney Birdwell,*Donte Bonner, Bill Cheng, Nicole Counts, Margaret Dunham, Chris Edmund, Alison Fraser,*Cecila Flores, Kaitlyn Greenridge, Alison Hart, Chris Jackson, Soneela Nankani, Victory Matsui, Kivlighan de Montebello, Meera Nair, Lorna Raver, Rajiv Surendra, Oliver Wyman, and an ensemble cast
Advance praise for Good Talk
“[A] breezy but poignant graphic memoir that takes on racism, love, and the election of President Trump. . . . The collage effect creates an odd, immediate intimacy. [Mira Jacob] employs pages of narrative prose sparingly but hauntingly. . . . The `talks' Jacob relates are painful, often hilarious, and sometimes absurd, but her memoir makes a fierce case for continuing to have them.”-Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“A beautiful and eye-opening account of what it means to mother a brown boy and what it means to live in this country post-9/11, as a person of color, as a woman, as an artist . . .*In Jacob's brilliant hands, we are gifted with a narrative that is sometimes hysterically funny, always honest, and ultimately healing.”-Jacqueline Woodson, National Book Award-winning author of*Another Brooklyn
“Mira Jacob just made me toss everything I thought was possible in a book-as-art-object into the garbage. Her new book changes everything.”-Kiese Laymon,*New York Times bestselling author of*Heavy
[I] loved it so so much. So poignant, honest, funny, powerful, and timely, and its themes build in a way that by the end is truly artistically transcendent.”—Curtis Sittenfeld, New York Times bestselling author of Prep and Eligible
“Among its many virtues, Mira Jacob’s graphic memoir, Good Talk, helps us think through this term [‘person of color’] with grace and disarming wit. The book lives up to its title, and reading these searching, often hilarious tête-à-têtes is as effortless as eavesdropping on a crosstown bus. . . . The medium is part of the magic. . . . The old comic-book alchemy of words and pictures opens up new possibilities of feeling. . . . The people are black and white—except, of course, they’re not.”—Ed Park, The New York Times Book Review
“Good Talk addresses head-on the complexities of being fully American while also being fully Jewish, fully Indian, fully mixed, fully whatever in the era of Trump. . . . Good Talk attempts to answer, with humor and heart, some of the most difficult questions of all.”—Bustle
“[A] showstopping memoir about race in America . . . by turns funny, philosophical, cautious, and heartbreaking . . . Particularly moving are the chapters in which Jacob explores how even those close to her retain closed-minded and culturally defined prejudices. . . . The memoir works well visually, with striking pen-and-ink drawings . . . collaged onto vibrant found photographs and illustrated backgrounds. . . . Told with immense bravery and candor, this book will make readers hunger for more of Jacob’s wisdom and light.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Breezy but poignant . . . [Mira Jacob] employs pages of narrative prose sparingly but hauntingly. . . . The ‘talks’ Jacob relates are painful, often hilarious, and sometimes absurd, but her memoir makes a fierce case for continuing to have them.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“A beautiful and eye-opening account of what it means to mother a brown boy and what it means to live in this country post–9/11, as a person of color, as a woman, as an artist . . . In Jacob’s brilliant hands, we are gifted with a narrative that is sometimes hysterically funny, always honest, and ultimately healing.”—Jacqueline Woodson, National Book Award–winning author of Another Brooklyn
“Good Talk begins with a child’s innocent questions about race and evolves into an honest, direct, and heartbreakingly funny journey. As a brown-skinned woman married to a Jewish man and the mother of a biracial child, I experienced this book on multiple levels: It broke my heart and made me laugh a helluva lot, but, in the end, it also forced me to ponder whether I have successfully provided the answers necessary to arm my own children against racism in America.”—Lynn Nottage, Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright of Sweat
★ 2019-04-18 A novelist explores the perils and joys of parenting, marriage, and love in this showstopping memoir about race in America.
When her 6-year-old, half-Jewish, half-Indian son, Z, started asking complicated questions about Michael Jackson's skin color, Jacob (The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing, 2014) faced the challenge of being honest about racism in America without giving him answers that might be too much to handle at such a tender age. The result is this series of illustrated conversations between Z and the author, by turns funny, philosophical, cautious, and heartbreaking. "Every question Z asked," writes Jacob, "made me realize the growing gap between the America I'd been raised to believe in and the one rising fast all around us." These reflections compelled the author to excavate her formative years in New Mexico and, later, in New York as a young writer struggling through her 20s. Jacob grew up navigating a constant stream of expectations from her parents, who emigrated from India to the American Southwest in the middle of the civil rights movement. Particularly moving are the chapters in which Jacob explores how even those close to her retain closed-minded and culturally defined prejudices. With grace and honesty, the author chronicles how she navigated the racist assumptions of an employer and dealt with Indian relatives who viewed her as "a darkie" with no marriage prospects as well as the devastating decision of her Jewish in-laws to vote for Donald Trump. "I feel awful," Jacob explained to her husband. "I feel like they've abandoned me." The memoir works well visually, with striking pen-and-ink drawings of Jacob and her family that are collaged onto vibrant found photographs and illustrated backgrounds. Occasionally the author reuses a drawing to spectacular effect, as when the faces of a white boyfriend and colleague from her past show up in a collage about the responses of white Americans to Trump's candidacy. Told with immense bravery and candor, this book will make readers hunger for more of Jacob's wisdom and light.
The visual echoes between past and present make this extraordinary memoir about difficult conversations all the more powerful.
Reading is a deeply satisfying, solitary activity, but we all know books really are best when shared. The booksellers who sit on the selection committee for our Discover Great New Writers program are some of the smartest, most widely read, and certainly most opinionated readers I’ve had the fortune to work with—we’re always on the […]
The winners of Barnes & Noble’s 2018 Discover Awards have been announced! In the fiction category, Paul Howarth’s Only Killers and Thieves took the honor, and in nonfiction, Kiese Laymon went home with the prize for his memoir Heavy. Each writer was awarded a cash prize of $30,000 and a full year of marketing and merchandising support […]
