Amnesia of June Bugs

AMNESIA OF JUNE BUGS redefines what a novel can be. Hurricane Sandy has just smashed into the Eastern Seaboard, trapping four passengers on the C train: a Chinese American graffiti artist grieving his father’s death, a mixed-race graphic designer struggling to become a mom, a Moroccan French translator escaping his heartache in Paris, and an Indian American traveler leaving Chicago to regain control of her life. Amnesia of June Bugs is an ambitious, infatuated, and furious book about the time we lost and the people we could have loved.

Publication Date: 26 April 2022

Blurbs

“Jackson Bliss paints with words. He is the Kendrick Lamar of the literary world.”

—REGINA KING, Emmy-award-winning actress & director

“Amnesia of June Bugs is a lush, kaleidoscopic love song to the city. Jackson Bliss’s voice is original, and intricately wrought. It is cerebral and tender. There is so much passion and love in these pages. I love how central a role identity and mixed race experience play here, and how this thrilling story keeps you gripped all the while, like a train underground in a storm, headed for what you can’t know but can’t stop reading to find out.”  

—TOMMY ORANGE, Pulitzer Prize winning author of There There

“In Amnesia of June Bugs, Jackson Bliss has written a bold, innovative masterpiece. I luxuriated over every sentence of this smart, zeitgeisty novel. At once tender and acute, Bliss deftly captures the multifaceted lives of his diverse cast of characters. The amalgamation of honest characters, stylistic feats, and shrewd social commentary makes this singular novel a must-read.

 —AMY MEYERSON, author of The Bookshop of Yesterdays and The Imperfects

“In Amnesia of June Bugs, Jackson Bliss delivers a hip, intimate, and heartfelt exploration of our multicultural, cosmopolitan world, one full of promise and yet under threat. He is one of the great advocates and defenders of such a world, so urgently embodied in this very necessary novel.”

—VIET THANH NGUYEN, Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Sympathizer

“I love this book. Word for word, sentence for sentence, page for page, Jackson Bliss is a narrative and syntactical wonder. And in this novel—a cultural takedown that is at times gentle, at times furious and incisive—he takes no prisoners. Each character is both an ordinary individual navigating an unforgiving 21st urban landscape—Paris, Seattle, Chicago, New York—and an indefatigable warrior committed to love, to art, and to dispensing with the racism, hatred, and violence they encounter on the daily.  Amnesia of June Bugs is a howl and a call to recreate the world one friendship, one lover, once chance urban encounter at a time. I will read it again and again. 

—BONNIE NADZAM, author of Lions and Lamb

“A virtuosic feat of storytelling with fire on every page. It feels prophetic, like a meditation on aspects of identity and pop culture that haven’t even been invented yet.”

—JAMIE FORD, NYT bestselling author of books not as well written as this one

”In Amnesia of June Bugs, Ginger Lin, Winnie Yu, Aziz Al-Wahnan, and Suzanne Gupta are trapped on the C-train in the NYC underground. Hurricane Sandy swirls above. In this brief rupture in time, their rebellious metamorphoses intersect, stories emerging from hybrid bodies, woven cultures, translingual narratives at play with graffiti, screenplay, questionnaire, lyric lists. Jackson Bliss, diasporic hapa-Whitman, has written protest poem, manifesto, and anthem—a 21st century love song to America.

—KAREN TEI YAMASHITA, author of Sansei & Sensibility: Stories

“Jackson Bliss is as verbally exuberant as any writer I've come across in years. Amnesia of June Bugs is beautifully conceived, powerful, affecting, hip, comedic, and as close to being of-the-moment as it is possible for a novel to be.”

—T.C. BOYLE, award-winning author of The Terranauts

"A kaleidoscopic and polyphonic novel that vividly portrays a multicultural, Pan-Asian world while reflecting, in smart and moving ways, on the complications and complexities of art, identity, love, and belonging."

—JENNY BHATT, author of Each of Us Killers

“A visionary novel that boldly invents a new American patois to light the way. Jackson Bliss is hellbent on telling the truth about the lived experience of his diverse characters and the result is haunting and shot through with weird pathos. Cutting edge but timeless in its preoccupation with the human heart and the grace notes found therein.”

 —GABE HUDSON, author of Gork, The Teenage Dragon and Dear Mr. President

“Ingenious in premise and wise in execution, this novel explores how lines of class, race, and nationality divide us in real and painful ways. Both tough-minded and generous, it finds us also capable of forging connections with great tensile strength. Bliss offers a portrait of American culture both true and unlike any I have encountered."

—ELISE BLACKWELL, author of Hunger and The Lower Quarter

Reviews

“Bliss delves deep into the strikingly different stories and experiences that have led each character to New York at this exact moment when their paths happen to cross. With his amalgamation of writing styles, Bliss upends the norms of the typical narrative. His experimental debut novel shows humans connecting, in the midst of their various individual struggles and identities, in real and surprising ways.”

—BOOKLIST

“The flow of observations, from Williamsburg hipsters to Bronx classrooms and Chinatown domino games, is both agitated and poetic, resulting in a multicultural, shifting perspective. Beyond its four “prisoners of darkness and coincidence,” Amnesia of June Bugs recalls the boundless, ruthless, and exhilarating energy of a pre-pandemic New York. 5/5 Stars.”

—FOREWORD REVIEWS

“This novel is really an endlessly arising and endlessly unfolding human story that, for all the suffering at its core, remains one of community and empowerment … The story of the novel unfolds during 2012, but it is so much a novel of the current moment. It's a world that seems both on the point of collapse and on the verge of transformation … This book includes a few of the most unbearably beautiful, heart-breaking love stories I have ever read. And that's saying something.”

—LIT PUB

Buzz

—One of the Notable Indie Books of 2022 for the Livingston Public Library, 11 January 2023

—Interview about Amnesia of June Bugs with Nidhi Shrivastava in The Masters Review, 3 November 2022

—Amnesia of June Bugs included in Books & Scarves, 7 August 2022

—Novel chapter of Amnesia of June Bugs published in The Offing, 30 June 2022

—Interview in Are You There Ghost? It’s Me, Chiwan about Amnesia of June Bugs (podcast & Youtube), 2 June 2022.

—Interview about Amnesia of June Bugs with Bonnie Nadzam in Lit Pub, 1 June 2022

—Amnesia of June Bugs mentioned in Book Goodies interview, 24 May 2022

—Amnesia of June Bugs listed in Book Goodies, 24 May 2022

—Amnesia of June Bugs mentioned in Awesome Gang interview, 15 May 2022

—Amnesia of June Bugs included in Awesome Gang, 14 May 2022

—Amnesia of June Bugs included in Mixed-Race Studies, 13 May 2022

—Amnesia of June Bugs included in Taylor Swift as Books, 5 May 2022

—Amnesia of June Bugs mentioned in Vol.1 Brooklyn’s “Morning Bites,” 3 May 2022

—Essay about Amnesia of June Bugs published in Necessary Fiction’s Research Notes: ”For Ten Years, This Novel was a Chunk of Starlight that I Buried In the Thick Earth & Then Dug Up Again, Heartbroken & Stubborn,” 29 April 2022

—Amnesia of June Bugs is one of Bookshop’s New Release titles, 28 April 2022

—Amnesia of June Bugs is a Foreword Reviews Book of the Day, 5/5 stars, 27 April 2022

—Amnesia of June Bugs mentioned in Apparel for Authors, 26 April 2022

—Amnesia of June Bugs reviewed in Foreword Reviews, 25 April 2022

—Amnesia of June Bugs mentioned in Shoutout LA interview 18 April 2022

—Amnesia of June Bugs & Dream Pop Origami mentioned in Past/Forward & A World Without Books & Past/Forward podcast, 12 April 2022

—Book Review for Amnesia of June Bugs, Booklist, 1 March 2022