As Lie Is to Grin

Praise

“Marsalis’s slim, ambitious debut tackles loss and racial identity . . . Marsalis incisively comments on a wide range of ideas, from authenticity to architecture.”—Publishers Weekly

“Marsalis’ deep and creative coming–of–age tale confronts race and omitted history. An exciting, thought–provoking debut.” —Booklist

“As Lie Is to Grin, Simeon Marsalis’s debut novel, is imbued with a constant sense of searching. . . . Poetic in its own way and thought provoking to its core, this slim novel from a young author marks the start of a promising career.” —Shelf Awareness for Readers (starred review)

“A sophisticated and complex work, this debut reconsiders the coming–of–age story for the twenty–first century.” —Foreword Reviews

“This affecting and unaffected story is for all readers.”” —Library Journal

“It’s rare when a novel changes my way of seeing, even more so when it’s a first novel by an author still in his twenties. Simeon Marsalis’s As Lie Is to Grin is not a satire meant to teach us lessons, nor a statement of hope or despair, but something more visionary––a portrait of a young man’s unraveling, a depiction of how race shapes and deforms us, a coming–of–age story that is also a confrontation with American history and amnesia. The book achieves more in its brief span than most books do at three times the length.”” — Zachary Lazar, author of I Pity the Poor Immigrant

“As Lie Is to Grin courageously works through the fraught legacy of race and ‘the color line,’ often transgressed with deep psychological consequences. In this haunting tale of one young man’s search for himself, Simeon Marsalis shuffles and refigures time so that our troubled history no longer hides in plain sight. This is superb writing that feels ceremonious in its wisdom and inexhaustible in its offerings.”” —Major Jackson, author of Roll Deep

“In his debut novel, Simeon Marsalis crafts a trippy and transgressive tale that bends the recognizable world in startling ways to broaden our understanding of what it means to be young, gifted, and black in America today. Simeon, I salute you. Your time to shine.”—Jeffery Renard Allen, author of Song of the Shank and Rails Under My Back

“As Lie Is to Grin is an extraordinarily sophisticated first novel, with an innovative structure involving a perpetually surprising cascade of harmony and dissonance. It’s also an unusually subtle and sensitive take on our twenty–first–century racial crisis, particularly as it plays out on campus. Simeon Marsalis is a writer to watch for many more reasons than that, but I will say that every college student in America today needs to read this book, and probably most of the professors.” —Madison Smartt Bell, author of the Haitian Revolution trilogy, beginning with All Souls’ Rising