书名：A Brief History of Seven Killings七次屠杀的简史
作者：Marlon James
出版社名称：Riverhead Books
出版时间：2015
语种：英文 
ISBN：9781594633942
商品尺寸：14 x 3.7 x 20.8 cm
包装：平装
页数：704

A Brief History of Seven Killings《七次屠杀的简史》的背景是1976年12月3月牙买加大选前、流行歌手鲍勃·马雷被枪杀的事件，以虚构的口述传记形式，由鬼魅、目击者、杀手、议员、毒品贩子、骗子、选美皇后、美国联邦调查局及中央情报局人员、记者、以及Keith Richards的毒品贩子讲述整个故事，其中“充满了惊喜、暴力和粗口”。

从70年代牙买加首都金斯顿的街头和贫民窟，到80年代纽约的毒品战争，一直到90年代经历了剧变的牙买加，站在当时在场者的角度，马龙开始讲述这段纵跨30年的故事，探索了牙买加混乱不堪的帮派与政治世界。这是一本富有原创性，同时又雄心勃勃的作品，展现了一部历经几代人的现代史诗。

媒体评论：
“这是一部粗俗、不打折扣的小说，讲述了牙买加历史上极度混乱的一段篇章；但它的叙事编排手法很高超，会用引人注目的语言来吸取读者的注意，”——乔纳森·卢平

“对书商来说，看到这样一部野心勃勃，富有原创性的作品得到认可并荣获大奖，那真是鼓舞人心的一件事，读者们早就对这本书报以很大的热情了。”——理查德·弗拉纳根，《通往深远北方的窄路》

“要怎么描述马龙·詹姆斯的这部新小说呢？这是一部史诗性作品：开阔神秘、上帝视角、宏大、令人震撼，而且相当复杂。它同样很糙，很厚重，很暴力，充斥着谩骂，有一种黑色幽默，同时让人读起来筋疲力尽。这一切都证明了詹姆斯先生的天才。”——《纽约时报》

Winner of the 2015 Man Booker Prize
A recipient of the 2015 American Book Award
One of the Top 10 Books of 2014 – Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
A New York Times Book Review Notable Book

A “thrilling, ambitious . . . intense” (Los Angeles Times) novel that explores the attempted assassination of Bob Marley in the late 1970s.
In A Brief History of Seven Killings, Marlon James combines masterful storytelling with his unrivaled skill at characterization and his meticulous eye for detail to forge a novel of dazzling ambition and scope.
On December 3, 1976, just before the Jamaican general election and two days before Bob Marley was to play the Smile Jamaica Concert to ease political tensions in Kingston, seven unnamed gunmen stormed the singer’s house, machine guns blazing. The attack wounded Marley, his wife, and his manager, and injured several others. Little was officially released about the gunmen, but rumors abounded regarding the assassins’ fates. A Brief History of Seven Killings is James’s fictional exploration of that dangerous and unstable time in Jamaica’s history and beyond. Deftly spanning decades and continents and peopled with a wide range of characters—assassins, drug dealers, journalists, and even ghosts—James brings to life the people who walked the streets of 1970s Kingston, who dominated the crack houses of 1980s New York, and who reemerged into a radically altered Jamaica of the 1990s. Brilliantly inventive, A Brief History of Seven Killings is an “exhilarating” (The New York Times) epic that’s been called “a tour de force” (The Wall Street Journal).

Review
"Nothing short of awe-inspiring."--Entertainment Weekly

"[A] tour de force... [an] audacious, demanding, inventive literary work."--Wall Street Journal

"Rendered with virtuosic precision and deep empathy."--Time

"A strange and wonderful novel...Mr. James's chronicle of late 20th-century Jamaican politics and gang wars manages consistently to shock and mesmerise at the same time." --The Economist

"Thrilling, ambitious...Both intense and epic."--Los Angeles Times

"A prismatic story of gang violence and Cold War politics in a turbulent post-independence Jamaica."--The New Yorker

"I highly recommend you pick [A Brief History of Seven Killings] up. As a book of many narrators, this novel reminds me of Roberto Bolano's The Savage Detectives."--NPR, All Things Considered

"The way James uses language is amazing....Vigorous, intricate and captivating, A Brief History of Seven Killings is hard to put down."--Ebony

"A gripping tale in which music, drugs, sex, and violence collide with explosive results."--Bustle

"James's masterful novel radiates; [it's] a character-driven tale that takes place in a maelstrom of guns, drugs and politics."--Playboy

"Brilliantly executed... The novel makes no compromises, but is cruelly and consummately a work of art."--The Minneapolis Star Tribune

本书以艺术的手法描写了该事件之后发生的多次谋杀和暴乱事件：12月3日，牙买加大选在即；2天后，鲍勃·马雷将要前往参加“微笑，牙买加”演唱会，以缓解金斯敦的政治紧张氛围。就在当天，七名枪手冲进了这位歌手的家中，拿着机枪扫射。他本人、妻子和经纪人重伤，其他一些人轻伤。官方并未就此给出什么消息，但是金斯敦流言满天飞，人们怀疑这起袭击背后有政治推动……

马龙·詹姆斯（Marlon James），凭借《七次屠杀的简史》获得布克奖，是第1位获得该奖的牙买加作家。

Marlon Jameswas born in Jamaica in 1970. His most recent novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings, won the 2015 Man Booker Prize. It was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature for fiction, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for fiction, and the Minnesota Book Award. It was also a New York Times Notable Book. James is also the author of The Book of Night Women, which won the 2010 Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Minnesota Book Award, and was a finalist for the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction and an NAACP Image Award. His first novel, John Crow’s Devil, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for first fiction and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and was a New York Times Editors’ Choice. James lives in Minneapolis.

Listen.

Dead people never stop talking. Maybe because death is not death at all, just a detention after school. You know where you’re coming from and you’re always returning from it. You know where you’re going though you never seem to get there and you’re just dead. Dead. It sounds final but it’s a word missing an ing. You come across men longer dead than you, walking all the time though heading nowhere and you listen to them howl and hiss because we’re all spirits or we think we are all spirits but we’re all just dead. Spirits that slip inside other spirits. Sometimes a woman slips inside a man and wails like the memory of making love. They moan and keen loud but it comes through the window like a whistle or a whisper under the bed, and little children think there’s a monster. The dead love lying under the living for three reasons. (1) We’re lying most of the time. (2) Under the bed looks like the top of a coffin, but (3) There is weight, human weight on top that you can slip into and make heavier, and you listen to the heart beat while you watch it pump and hear the nostrils hiss when their lungs press air and envy even the shortest breath. I have no memory of coffins.

But the dead never stop talking and sometimes the living hear. This is what I wanted to say. When you’re dead speech is nothing but tangents and detours and there’s nothing to do but stray and wander awhile. Well, that’s at least what the others do. My point being that the expired learn from the expired, but that’s tricky. I could listen to myself, still claiming to anybody that would hear that I didn’t fall, I was pushed over the balcony at the Sunset Beach Hotel in Montego Bay. And I can’t say shut your trap, Artie Jennings, because every morning I wake up having to put my pumpkin-smashed head back together. And even as I talk now I can hear how I sounded then, can you dig it, dingledoodies? meaning that the afterlife is just not a happening scene, not a groovy shindig, Daddy-O, see those cool cats on the mat? They could never dig it, and there’s nothing to do but wait for the man that killed me, but he won’t die, he only gets older and older and trades out wives for younger and younger and breeding a whole brood of slow-witted boys and running the country down into the ground.

Dead people never stop talking and sometimes the living hear. Sometimes he talks back if I catch him right as his eyes start to flicker in his sleep, talks until his wife slaps him. But I’d rather listen to the longer dead. I see men in split breeches and bloody longcoats and they talk, but blood comes out of their mouths and good heavens that slave rebellion was such ghastly business and that queen has of course been of bloody awful use ever since the West India Company began their rather shoddy decline compared to the East and why are there so many negroes taking to sleeping so unsoundly wherever they see fit and confound it all I seem to have misplaced the left half of my face. To be dead is to understand that dead is not gone, you’re in the flatness of the deadlands. Time doesn’t stop. You watch it move but you are still, like a painting with a Mona Lisa smile. In this space a three-hundred-year-old slit throat and two-minute-old crib death is the same.