Shackling Water - Rilegato

"With Shackling Water, Adam Mansbach has crafted a literary debut of breathtaking splendor. Equally at home with jazz and hip hop, and as comfortable with high cultural classicism as with vernacular vibrations, Mansbach riffs like Coltrane, flows like Biggie Smalls, and heats the page with prose that might have spilled forth had Whitman learned the blues. . . . a remarkable literary achievement and a true artistic gem." –Michael Eric Dyson, author of Holler if You Hear Me: Searching for Tupac Shakur

"How fast and fluent is Adam Mansbach's prose; how reminiscent of Baldwin's, Ellison's and Baraka's ways of creating new rhythms with new ways of dancing words and attitudes. Here is virtuoso storytelling with a musical insistence and a drive to discover what it means to make art against the drift and noise of everyday life in America. Here is writing that seems to know the whole tradition but still seek to rhyme with today and tomorrow. Here is a novel to make clear that the tradition of jazz writing at its finest is alive and kicking!"
–Robert O'Meally, Director of the Center for Jazz Studies and author of The Craft of Ralph Ellison and The Jazz Cadence of American Culture

"This is a bold, beautiful, brilliant book, unafraid to grapple with race and art and love at a time when so many young novelists are. Mansbach is just the kind of writer we need." –William "Upski" Wimsatt, author of No More Prisons and Bomb the Suburbs

Adam Mansbach, 25, is the founding editor of the pioneering hip hop journal, Elementary, and currently serves as an artistic consultant to Columbia University's Center for Jazz Studies. His poetry collection, genius b-boy cynics getting weeded in the garden of delights, was published to great acclaim in late 2001. He has traveled as a drum technician for the Elvin Jones Jazz Machine and a Richmond B. Williams Fellow studying hip hop culture abroad, taught writing and hip hop classes for New York City public high school students, and has written for publications including 360hiphop, Feed, and Trace. An MC and performer who collaborates with both jazz and hip hop musicians, he lives in Fort Greene, Brooklyn.