Enter to win The Lede to Our Undoing

Enter to win The Lede to Our Undoing by Donald Mengay. To enter the contest, fill out the form below between Friday, September 1, and Friday, September 22.

1970s rust-belt America. The era of civil rights, women 's rights, and gay rights, as well as the birth of the environmental movement. Twins Jake and Wren are raised in the white-flight suburb of Laurentine, not far from the industrial metropolis named a century-and-a-half ago the Forest City. The twin 's parents, Harry and Florrie, are doing their best to keep their offspring on the straight and narrow, according to ideas that today would be labeled MAGA America, before it got the name. But the two are not very good at coloring between the lines. Wren falls in love with an African-American youth named Donald, and Jake falls in love with first Romeo and then Peacoat-with traumatic results. Their story is told by the family mutt, Molly, whose outsider status offers the reader a unique view of human prejudice.

Molly's an observer akin to Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby, there on the sidelines, but unlike him she's relegated to silence in the culture. Existing both in- and outside of the usual signifying economy, her status as Other confers on her the ability to view people not as types but individuals. Speaking from below, literally, informs her expectations of those around her: basic kindness and caring; a sense of responsibility not just for herself but all sentient beings, as well as the planet.

Advance Praise

This is a big-ideas (yes, plural) novel-big-hearted, too. Set in the Midwest-end of the Rust Belt, the story resonates beyond geography, as do its characters, whose see-saw lives of economic downsizing and religious uplifting are generously rendered in language attuned to the reality and poetry of lived experience. If this sounds all too human, Mengay troubles that too with a canny narrator whose roving eye doesn 't miss a thing. We 've not seen ourselves in fiction in the way Molly sees us.

-Rick Rodriguez, author of Immunity's Sovereignty

Donald Mengay 's beautiful new work, The Lede to Our Undoing, provides a peripatetic, witty view of late 1960 's life among a band of outsiders who are discovering, as is their generation, a way to live truthfully, lovingly, and bravely. With a memorable cast of characters trying to navigate youthful rebellion, sexual identity, drug exploration, as well as an extremely unusual but uniquely articulate narrator, Mengay recreates for the reader the experience of leaving home as a young adult. His band of vagabonds support one another, fight occasionally, love even more, and embody the need so many young Americans had-and have-to escape from their family and community, even though they may not know how on earth to do that. The realistic dialogue balances delicately with the poetic narrative commentary upon the experience of this unique yet universal band of travelers. Donald Mengay has written a Bildungsroman that is moving, funny, and utterly memorable

-Victoria Amador author of The Gothic Portal and Olivia de Havilland: Lady Triumphant

About the Author

Donald Mengay earned a Masters in English from the University of Denver and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from NYU. He taught Queer and Post-Humanist Lit at the City University of New York for over thirty years, as well as English Lit at the University of Paris, Nanterre. During his years teaching he published several articles of queer criticism in academic journals that include among others Genders, Genre, and Minnesota University Press. He has also published a book entitled Dis/Inheritance: New Croatian Photography, from Ikon Arts Press. He began writing fiction in the early 2000s. The Lede to Our Undoing is his debut novel, the first in a trilogy. He was born and raised in a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio, where he worked in a factory for a time. He studied painting briefly at Kent State University before moving to Idaho Springs, CO.

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