Published in Germany in 2012, Imperium made a splash in its home country and finally arrived on American shores this year.

This unassuming gem works its way into your mind, where it will linger long after you’ve turned the last page. Luiselli, who worked closely with MacSweeney on the translation, has a deft comic touch and imbues her prose with a seemingly effortless lyricality. But as the story twists and turns, we see how Highway’s fabulism both creates a captivating autobiography and makes it impossible to separate his reality from his fantasy. With the money he amasses, he purchases the purported teeth of Marilyn Monroe herself, which he has implanted into his own mouth. He turns his life around by becoming an auctioneer, claiming to be the greatest one in the world. Growing up without significant resources, stumbling into a bad marriage and then a divorce that separated him from his only child, Highway dreams of being able to afford dental implants. The narrator, Gustavo Sánchez Sánchez, aka Highway, sees the story as his dental autobiography. This slim novel is a story about stories on every level: Why we create them, who we create them for, how much value they have, whether they can define and change who we are. By turns darkly hilarious and bone-achingly tragic, Welcome to Braggsville rips open the thin camouflage Northerners and Southerners, liberals and conservatives alike throw over our race problems to reveal the ugly truth beneath. Though D’aron refuses to believe his home harbors anything but good at its heart, the naive actions of the gang of friends will have consequences devastating beyond comprehension. Then D’aron unwisely reveals to them that his hometown stages a yearly Civil War reenactment, and they’re off to spend the break conspiring to disrupt the reenactment with a protest. Once there, he befriends three kids who couldn’t be more unlike him - Louis, an in-your-face Malaysian-American comedian Candice, a liberal do-gooder from the Midwest and Charlie, a black inner-city kid with a serious drive to succeed. D’aron Davenport, a doughy white boy raised in the titular small Georgia town, can’t wait to escape to college at Berkeley. Johnson’s latest novel hit an odd note in the year of Black Lives Matter it’s almost too timely of a satire on America’s fatal race problem in the South and beyond.

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