This book is astoundingly beautiful and devastating. It is dark and funny and really gets at the confusion of cities, gender, masculinity, and child hood. It is also irreverent and experimental.

L.A. sounds like a terrible place to live...

Fans of Middlesex will surely like The Virgin of Flames. The synopsis (a street artist who's obsessed with a transexual) had me unsure that it would be my kind of book, despite having loved Abani's last book, Graceland. Abani picks up where he left off with the strange eroticism that his last character got out of putting on makeup as an Elvis impersonator, and takes it to the next level...hell, he takes it ten levels beyond that, into a gritty, beautiful, story of a muralist in L.A. which is als...

Los Angeles, California. Black is a busy man. By day he collects racist and sexist jokes from toilets for his mural (one from Buckingham Palace via Sharon Osborne), while being stalked by Archangel Gabriel, and obsessing over transvestite stripper, Sweet Girl. By night he stands atop his spaceship in Iggy the psychic tattooist’s wedding dress, letting devotees believe he is the Virgin Mary.It’s so self-consciously edgy, it’s painful. Maybe I’m a cynical conventionalist, but I’m not sold on his c...

A violent and visceral take on the abstract experience of being multi-racial in the United States. Abani physicalizes what can often be a very nebulous and ephemeral existence, and stabs onto the page the confusion, the shape-shifting, and liminal consciousness of mixed race identities. Set in the City of Angels, he brilliantly captures what often defies language.

According to my kindle I'm 22% in on this book... I like the characters. However I feel like it's just dragging out at a snails pace and it doesn't keep my attention.

I feel bad. I certainly do not have the street cred to *not* love this book by a gay, politically oppressed Nigerian. And I have to say that at least I was able to finish this one -- unlike Graceland, which I have checked out and returned about a million times. I just... I just don't want to hear that much about penises. I get that it is a valid topic to write about. I even imagine that, five years ago, I could have written a fabulously self-indulgent paper on Black and his penis and his experie...

It's rare that an author with so much depth can still manage to be so cool. This book travels as fluidly through the lives of its downtrodden Los Angeles protagonists as the river that so frequently haunts its imagery. Jazz-like poetry saturates every line without pretense as Abani sneaks up behind the ghost of disenfranchisement, pulls the sheet off, and shows us all the face we share. If you haven't read this book (or his previous novel, Graceland) I highly recommend it.

i am blown away by this fantastic book. i tried to read it a few years ago but i wasn't in the right space and i found it too difficult. some of it is prose poetry. many passages are stunning. i am tempted to copy the whole rosary gloss here but it's long. read it. find it and read it. amazing stuff. black is a grown man who's spiraling downward while gripped by conflicting powerful forces, among them an uncontrollable creative drive (he paints murals), torturous childhood memories, apparitions

Black, a 36-year-old (the age of Christ) half-Nigerian half-Salvadorean mural artist spends his time being chased around East LA by the archangel Gabriel while he obsesses over a transexual stripper and his own desire to dress in women's clothes, as he paints a fifty-foot tall mural of the Virgin of Fatima. Sounds crazy, but it is told so well that I believe it. I loved the dirty city imagery and the casual drug use portrayed.Very good characters, Black, Ziggy and Bomboy are all interesting, and...

Even after finishing this I don’t know what actually happens in it, it was just weird and confusing. However, it wasn’t all bad, the language flows beautifully and Iggy is a character worth remembering.

This novel by Chris Abani is the literary equivalent of a Diane Arbus photograph—unsettling, terrible, grotesque, yet artistic. In the strange underbelly of the City of Angels Abani finds a kind of hope that describes something in human nature. His dreams, his attempts to “attend his ghosts,” are difficult to look at, but of all the people we might choose to illuminate the depths of human natures, Abani is among the most courageous and compassionate.Ambiguous sexuality and race, death and desire...

This is a novel which, lamentably, is too often mistaken for a representation of "real life" (whatever that is) for queer and trans people of color (and/or sex workers) in Los Angeles. Abani's said it himself before (look up his TED Talks online-- they're great)-- that a gendered or raced person is inevitably read for his identity rather than his imagination. If you're going to read this novel, the worst thing you could do is put on the anthropologist's khaki hat, walk in with your legal pad, an...

chilling, hilarious and tragic. all the more incredible after seeing C.Abani read last Friday night in the District of Columbia. weaves together gender, race, catholicism, child abuse, black outs, and the Blackmobile (a yellow VW bus) into some stellar depictions of Los Angeles.

This book surprised me. It was heartbreaking and sad; yet, there were spots of humor and joy. Abani wrote with amazing poetry. His descriptions of Los Angeles were specific and colorful. His characters were honest and triumphant, even as they were shameful and violent.

You should read this book if you enjoy hearing other people bitch and moan about how hard their lives are in a painful fashion that lacks wit and clever design.

Chris Abani's The Virgin of Flames comes close to being a great novel, and certainly one of the best recent novels written about Los Angeles. The only problem is the author does not know what to do with his main character, Black. Throughout the book, he fiddles around painting murals, and being torn between Sweet Girl -- who is actually a transsexual stripper -- and his landlady Iggy. Abani's strength is his vision of Los Angeles, mostly as seen from East L.A. There are fully half a dozen places...

There are two ways for me to think about The Virgin of Flames. A.) it is a typical (and overdone) coming of age novel from a liberal UC professor focused on gender, sexuality and ethnicity. Or, B.) it's a probing study of East and Downtown LA from a global citizen who is at once native and guest of Lagos, London, and Los Angeles. Obviously, I prefer sticking with B. For anyone who has waited hours in LA's Union Station or who has bought a piñata on Olympic, Abani's descriptions ring truer and cl...

this novel is fabulous, told from the pov of a transsexual. abani does a lovely job of turning LA into an affectionate character. lyrically moving.

The characters in the book are fable like and the story takes place in East LA. The beautiful, gritty prose elegantly capture an essence of a city known as the City of Angels. I will continue to read passages from this book because of the writing. Mr Abani's chapters click off like photographs, and like a photograph can privately and intimately draw you into that world.