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Book Summary and Reviews of The Fantasies of Future Things by Doug Jones

The Fantasies of Future Things by Doug Jones

The Fantasies of Future Things

A Novel

by Doug Jones

  • Publishes:
  • Apr 22, 2025, 288 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

In this powerful debut reminiscent of Barry Jenkins's Moonlight, two men in Atlanta reconcile their human dignity against the price of their professional ambitions working for a real estate development company displacing Black residents in preparation for the 1996 Olympics.

Daily interactions between Jacob and Daniel are a powder keg of sexual tension and uncertainty. A recent Morehouse graduate and Brooklyn transplant, Jacob fears that accepting the truth of his sexuality will disappoint the hopes his parents have for him to lead a respectable life. Grieving the death of his mother while searching for answers about a father he has never known, Daniel, an Atlanta native, has resigned himself to the reality that men who love men don't have happy endings.

When Jacob meets Sherman, a social worker fighting for one of the families being displaced by the project, he must decide if rejecting security is worth the risk of embracing the unknown. In the midst of navigating his grief, and volatile relationship with Jacob, Daniel learns of his father's identity. Though meeting his father could provide Daniel with the closure he has always sought, the distance between what Daniel wants and what he's willing to do for it remains a question only he can answer.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"Gorgeously compassionate, this debut is as sharp as our past—and bright as our future." ­—Tayari Jones, New York Times bestselling author of An American Marriage

This information about The Fantasies of Future Things was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

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More Information

Douglas E. Jones graduated from Morehouse College and received an MFA from Columbia University. In 2007, he was an inaugural Lambda Literary Fellow at American Jewish University, where he studied with Dorothy Allison. His nonfiction has been included in the anthology Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social and Political Black Literature & Art and his poetry has been published in Sojourner: Black Gay Voices in the Age of AIDS. Doug is a full-time, licensed real estate agent in Brooklyn, New York, and Atlanta, Georgia. He lives in Atlanta. The Fantasies of Future Things is his debut novel.

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