In The Fantasies of Future Things, 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.
LitStackers! Get ready to add another title to your “TBR” list! The Fantasies of Future Things by Doug Jones is in presale and generating serious buzz. This novel from Simon & Schuster set for publication April 22, 2025, has early readers buzzing. We’ll show you the book cover, the publisher’s official description and some early reviews that suggest this book is one you want to pre-order today. Here we go!
In This Spotlight On The Fantasies of Future Things
About The Fantasies of Future Things
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.
Praise for The Fantasies of Future Things
Publishers Weekly
In Jones’s resonant if underdeveloped debut, two young Black men uneasily take part in a real estate scheme to raze houses for the 1996 summer Olympics. Jacob and Daniel’s white boss, Beth, tasks them with knocking on doors in Atlanta’s Summerhill neighborhood—“not quite a ghetto, but almost,” Jones writes—to make offers on her behalf. After Jacob is beaten by disgruntled residents protesting against Beth’s development plans, he refuses to press charges out of sympathy for their position. Then Jacob is set up on a date with protest organizer Sherman, who is shocked to learn that he works for Beth. The episode adds to Jacob’s struggle with accepting his sexuality and coming out to his parents. Meanwhile, Daniel searches for his father, whom he never knew, and tension brews between the coworkers when he makes an unwanted pass at Jacob.
Jones takes a deep dive into the effects of housing inequality on the city’s Black community, and he offers many perceptive insights into Black male sexuality, as Jacob tries to envision what his life would look like if he were openly gay. Unfortunately, as the men’s story lines converge, extensive flashbacks and narrative digressions reveal too little, particularly about Daniel, leaving the novel feeling unbalanced. Still, Jones is a writer worth keeping tabs on.”—Haley Heidmemann, WME. (Apr.)—Publishers Weekly
“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
About Doug Jones, Author of The Fantasies of Future Things
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.
Source: Publisher
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
ISBN: 9781668016282
Pub Date Apr 22, 2025
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