“An extraordinarily accomplished novel. Like Ellison’s Invisible Man, 
it is steeped in the most gorgeous Blues idioms. Daugherty’s 
description of Houston is so sharp-eyed and multi-layered that I can 
see the city more clearly in this book than I ever did with my own 
eyes. As good as anything I’ve read in Himes or Baldwin. I give this 
novel an unqualified, enthusiastic ‘thumbs up.’ It is a work of subtle 
genius and abundant heart.”—Reginald McKnight, author, The Kind 
of Light That Shines on Texas and He Sleeps

    “Ambitious, complicated and complex, and profound, Axeman’s 
Jazz is an identity novel, and a quest novel, but it’s also about race 
in America, and race in history. This is a novel that makes the 
reader ‘see.’”—Gordon Weaver, author, The Way We Know in Dreams

    Tracy Daugherty’s fourth novel explores the volatility of race, class, 
and economics as they affect three generations of a Houston, Texas,
family, and traces the rise and decline of an inner city neighborhood
from the point of view of a prodigal daughter. Twenty-something Telisha
Washington returns after many years to the decaying Houston
neighborhood where she was born, to renew old ties and come to
terms with her family’s enigmatic heritage. The product of a racially
mixed union, she has spent her life straddling received definitions of
race, class, gender, and culture. Her personal odyssey is centered
inside a black neighborhood’s convulsions, where violence, poverty, and
the politics of gentrification take their toll. An unflinching meditation
on family, race, sex, and love, as well as a dissection of public and
private identity, Axeman’s Jazz is a stark, but loving, portrait of 
contemporary urban America.

    “Compelling, thought provoking, intense. I congratulate the author 
on the richness of this work.”—Carol Lee Lorenzo, author, Nervous 
Dance

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Midland, Texas, native TRACY DAUGHERTY studied with Donald 
Barthelme at the University of Houston. He is the author of three 
previous novels: Desire Provoked, What Falls Away, and The Boy 
Orator (SMU, 1999). He has also published two story collections, 
The Woman in the Oil Field (SMU, 1996) and It Takes a Worried 
Man (SMU, 2002), as well as a volume of personal essays, Five 
Shades of Shadow. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, 
The Georgia Review, The Southern Review, Chelsea, The 
Gettysburg Review, The Ontario Review, The Southwest Review, 
and in many other literary venues. His short fiction has been 
honored with the Texas Institute of Letters Brazos Bookstore Award 
for Best Short Story and with the A. B. Guthrie Jr. Award. In 1998 
he received a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. 
He directs the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing at Oregon State 
University and is a member of the M.F.A. faculty at Warren Wilson 
College.



What people are saying about this book

“A valuable contribution to our American literature about race and 
identity and landscape. The musings of the main characters in the 
novel on urban renewal, on gang culture and drugs, on blight and 
flight and who’s right, on the web that is family and society and race 
and blood ties all were deeply ingrained in the movement of the 
novel as a whole, and all are musings Americans should read.”—
Susan Straight, author, Highwire Moon and The Gettin Place