Losing My Cool: Love, Literature, and a Black Man's Escape from the Crowd - Paperback

by Thomas Chatterton Williams (Author)

"A provocative, intellectual memoir" (USA Today)-from a remarkable new literary voice.

Growing up, Thomas Chatterton Williams knew he loved three things in life: his parents, literature, and the intoxicating hip-hop culture that surrounded him. For years, he managed to juggle two disparate lifestyles, "keeping it real" in his friends' eyes and studying for the SATs under his father's strict tutelage-until it all threatened to spin out of control. Written with remarkable candor and emotional depth, Losing My Cool portrays the allure and danger of hip-hop culture with the authority of a true fan who's lived through it all, while demonstrating the saving grace of literature and the power of the bond between father and son.

Author Biography

THOMAS CHATTERTON WILLIAMS is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of Summer of Our Discontent, Losing My Cool, and Self-Portrait in Black and White. He is a visiting professor of humanities and senior fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College, a 2022 Guggenheim fellow, and a non-resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Previously a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine and a columnist at Harper's, he has written for The New Yorker, the London Review of Books, and Le Monde, among other publications. He lives in Paris and New York.