WWW.PUBLISHERSWEEKLY.COM 19Bump deploys stealth humor. The reader doesn’t see it
coming—then it hits like an uppercut. In one scene, Claude
escapes the riot by running for his life past the Howards, whose
daughter “had bad breath and said gum made her feel normal.”
The speaker at Claude’s high school graduation thanks friends and
family, saying that, without them, “she would’ve committed
suicide by jumping off a medium-size apartment complex.” And
in a scene the reader hopes will turn sexy, he writes, “She held me
closer. I put my chin in her belly button.”
While studying at the University of Missouri in 2011, one of
Bump’s professors encouraged him to look for a program with
a stronger writing department. He moved back to Chicago the
next year, transferring to the School of the Art Institute, where
Everywhere took root. (The book’s second chapter, “Fog,” was
Bump’s undergraduate thesis.) He went from there to the
University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he got his MFA
in 2017 and completed the book. One of his teachers, Jeff
Parker, author of Ovenman, thought Bump’s work was so extraor-
dinary that he passed it along to his agent at Trident Media
Group, Ellen Levine, who suspected it was a perfect fit for her
colleague, Alexa Stark.
“I was completely blown away by the staccato prose and the
tender, wry voice.” Stark says. “It succeeded as a portrait of boy-
hood and racial politics.”
Bump experimented with five different endings before he
finished the final chapter, “Where We Belong,” to say exactly
what he wanted it to say. Stark rushed the manuscript off to 12
publishers. Kathy Pories, executive editor at Algonquin Press,
was stunned. “It was unlike anything I’d ever read: funny, absurd
and tragic all at the same time,” she says. “The book is stylisti-
cally smart. Bump injects humor into scary situations. He jumps
right into his character’s lives and what it means to be a black
man in America, how it is. That’s important territory right now.
All this told us this was a voice that was going somewhere.”
Pories moved fast. She put together a preempt offer—a two-
book deal for six figures. Stark set up a conversation between Pories
and Bump, both of whom liked what they heard.
“I couldn’t have dreamt of such a deal happening,” Bump says.
Bump is currently teaching two courses, on short fiction and
literature, at the University of Buffalo. Next semester, thanks to
his advance, he’ll be teaching one. A manuscript for his second
novel, about two college professors in Massachusetts forming an
underground society, is on his editor’s desk. He’s begun work on
a third, about a young man moving to Buffalo. Everywhere You
Don’t Belong has a film agent on board. Marketing will include an
eight-city tour, national TV and radio interviews, and national
print and online campaigns. Bump is 28 years old.
“Every step of the way and even now,” he says. “I wonder if I
can do it.”
He already has. ■The race riot starts the way many do, with an unarmed person
of color shot and killed by police. The boy was seen entering a
home where he’d promised to feed a neighbor’s cats; he’s
gunned down because he runs when the police arrive to inves-
tigate. Claude watches friends and neighbors, armed with
frying pans and bats, get shot and trampled. Told in the first
person, we see the riot through his innocent eyes. In sentences
that are short and declarative—like bullets—Bump describes
the action. He avoids the subjective, both here and throughout
Everywhere, fueling his jackhammer prose.OPEN BOOK|Column
Patricia Volk is a novelist and short story writer and the author of two memoirs,
Stuffed and Shocked.Kathy Pories Alexa StarkGabriel Bump
© jeremy handrup