https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jul/25/bryan-washington-my-next-book-is-a-gay-slacker-dramedy

The prize-winning young writer on the politics of restaurants, diversity in his home town of Houston, and why coming out is a constant process

Bryan Washington’s 2019 debut short story collection, Lot, was winner of the Dylan Thomas prize and listed as one of Barack Obama’s favourite books of the year. Set in impoverished Houston neighbourhoods, where gentrification threatens a collection of fierce and feisty characters – minimum-wage kitchen staff, drug dealers, sex workers – it is often darkly funny. At the book’s centre is Nicholas, the recurring narrator, who wrestles with his queerness and black-Latino identity. Washington, 27, has written for the New York Times, New Yorker and Paris Review. Lot is out in paperback on 6 August; his first novel, Memorial, follows early next year in the UK.

In Lot individual chapters represent different marginalised regions of Houston, your home town…
The city, for me, has no focal point. Houston is not inundated with “third” places; you go to work and then you go home and then you have the sprawl in between. There are landmarks that I would acknowledge that could be immediately invalidated by my neighbours and none of us would be wrong. It’s largely due to the diversity of the city; not just the ethnic diversity but also diversity of thought, economy and religion. Its residents have had to come together to find ways of functioning on a daily basis – not seamlessly, but what’s really cool about living here is the way that it’s understood you can live multiple lives simultaneously.