Hit and Run

Written by John Freeman

Narrated by Peter Berkrot

A prolific and celebrated poet, critic, editor, and teacher, John Freeman is one of the most recognized and versatile forces behind today’s literary scene. His Everand Original, Hit and Run, represents a departure for him as a writer. A work of autobiographical fiction, it inhabits that space between lived experience and the imagination’s riff on that experience.

It begins when the narrator — a newly married young man named John — witnesses an accident at the ragged end of a night out with friends. A hit-and-run in downtown Sacramento, California: “Bang! A body pinwheeling in the air,” Freeman writes. “Then something which felt like silence but surely wasn’t. Not at three a.m. at that intersection. When the reality reel rethreaded into the projector there was a man splayed out on the center median, a crowd of revelers laughing and teetering….”

The victim does not survive, and that fact — as surreal as it is undeniably real, as horrifying as it is commonplace in its testament to human fragility — becomes a destabilizing crack in John’s world. His sense of safety, home, and his own assumptions about himself are shaken, setting off a series of shock waves in his life that test his marriage, sanity, and what sort of justice is possible for the dead man or for any of us.

As the police try to find the driver responsible and enlist John’s help in the investigation, Hit and Run becomes a page-turning whodunit while taking on age-old and acutely topical human mysteries: how we make sense of the unimaginable and brutally unexpected, and how we manage to heal and find connection even as we’re hunted and haunted by loss and chaos. Perhaps the most personal and revealing work Freeman has ever written, it is also a story of romantic love lost and then — against all odds — found. Above all, it’s an urgent and audacious consideration of what it means to bear witness. Freeman does not shy from that responsibility, whatever the costs and frights, and word by word moves from the self-estrangement common in those made to cope with traumatic events to a kind of homecoming, with all the stakes and intimacy of personal essay and the poetics and possibility of the best literary fiction.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Everand Originals
• Release date: Apr 10, 2024
• ISBN: 9781094472430

John Freeman

John Freeman is an executive editor at Alfred A. Knopf, the founding editor of Freeman’s, and the former editor of Granta. He is also the author and editor of a dozen books, including the book-length essay Dictionary of the Undoing, the poetry collections Wind, Trees and The Park, and the anthologies Tales of Two Planets, Tales of Two Americas, The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story, and, with Tracy K. Smith, There’s a Revolution Outside, My Love. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Zyzzyva. Each month he hosts the California Book Club, an online discussion of a classic in Golden State literature, for Alta Journal. He lives in New York City.

Reviews for Hit and Run

[finedoc · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Very captivating and extremely well read! 5 star quick read. Now on to more by this author