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Part epic of Texas, part classic coming-of-age story, part unflinching examination of the bloody price of power, The Son is a gripping and utterly transporting novel that maps the legacy of violence in the American west with rare emotional acuity, even as it presents an intimate portrait of one family across two centuries. Eli McCullough is just twelve-years-old when a marauding band of Comanche storm his Texas homestead and brutally murder his mother and sister, taking him as a captive.
In late 2003, in his column in Entertainment Weekly, Stephen King called The Memory of Running "the best novel you won't read this year." This glowing endorsement of the audiobook resulted in Ron McLarty receiving a $2 million two-book deal from Viking Penguin. Also, Warner Brothers has shelled out big bucks for the movie rights to The Memory of Running, for which McLarty will write the script.
When Parsifal, a handsome and charming magician, dies suddenly, his widow Sabine - who was also his faithful assistant for 20 years - learns that the family he claimed to have lost in a tragic accident is very much alive and well.
As the world enters a new century, three teenagers forge a future for themselves on the wild Texas grasslands: Gideon Fry, torn between going his way and following his father's footsteps; Johnny McCloud, whose restless spirit finds its solace traversing an open range; and Molly Taylor, the woman they both love. Rugged, bold and volatile, the three of them come of age in this tender and intimate novel of the heart.
Philip Roth presents a vivid portrait of an innocent man being swept away by a current of conflict and violence in his own backyard - a story that is as much about loving America as it is hating it. Seymour "Swede" Levov, a legendary high school athlete, a devoted family man, a hard worker, and the prosperous heir of his father's Newark glove factory comes of age in thriving, triumphant postwar America. But everything he loves is lost when the country begins to run amok in the turbulent 1960s. Not even a most private, well-intentioned citizen, it seems, gets to sidestep the sweep of history. American Pastoral is the story of a fortunate American's rise and fall ... a strong, confident man, a master of social equilibrium, overwhelmed by the forces of social disorder. For the Swede is not allowed to stay forever blissful living out life in rural Old Rimrock in his 170 year-old stone farmhouse with his pretty wife (his college sweetheart and Miss New Jersey of 1949) and his lively albeit precocious daughter, the apple of his eye ... that is until she grows up to become a revolutionary terrorist.
In this powerful, eerily convincing fictional speculation on the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Don DeLillo chronicles Lee Harvey Oswald's odyssey from troubled teenager to a man of precarious stability who imagines himself an agent of history. When "history" presents itself in the form of two disgruntled CIA operatives who decide that an unsuccessful attempt on the life of the president will galvanize the nation against communism, the scales are irrevocably tipped.
Part epic of Texas, part classic coming-of-age story, part unflinching examination of the bloody price of power, The Son is a gripping and utterly transporting novel that maps the legacy of violence in the American west with rare emotional acuity, even as it presents an intimate portrait of one family across two centuries. Eli McCullough is just twelve-years-old when a marauding band of Comanche storm his Texas homestead and brutally murder his mother and sister, taking him as a captive.
In late 2003, in his column in Entertainment Weekly, Stephen King called The Memory of Running "the best novel you won't read this year." This glowing endorsement of the audiobook resulted in Ron McLarty receiving a $2 million two-book deal from Viking Penguin. Also, Warner Brothers has shelled out big bucks for the movie rights to The Memory of Running, for which McLarty will write the script.
When Parsifal, a handsome and charming magician, dies suddenly, his widow Sabine - who was also his faithful assistant for 20 years - learns that the family he claimed to have lost in a tragic accident is very much alive and well.
As the world enters a new century, three teenagers forge a future for themselves on the wild Texas grasslands: Gideon Fry, torn between going his way and following his father's footsteps; Johnny McCloud, whose restless spirit finds its solace traversing an open range; and Molly Taylor, the woman they both love. Rugged, bold and volatile, the three of them come of age in this tender and intimate novel of the heart.
Philip Roth presents a vivid portrait of an innocent man being swept away by a current of conflict and violence in his own backyard - a story that is as much about loving America as it is hating it. Seymour "Swede" Levov, a legendary high school athlete, a devoted family man, a hard worker, and the prosperous heir of his father's Newark glove factory comes of age in thriving, triumphant postwar America. But everything he loves is lost when the country begins to run amok in the turbulent 1960s. Not even a most private, well-intentioned citizen, it seems, gets to sidestep the sweep of history. American Pastoral is the story of a fortunate American's rise and fall ... a strong, confident man, a master of social equilibrium, overwhelmed by the forces of social disorder. For the Swede is not allowed to stay forever blissful living out life in rural Old Rimrock in his 170 year-old stone farmhouse with his pretty wife (his college sweetheart and Miss New Jersey of 1949) and his lively albeit precocious daughter, the apple of his eye ... that is until she grows up to become a revolutionary terrorist.
In this powerful, eerily convincing fictional speculation on the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Don DeLillo chronicles Lee Harvey Oswald's odyssey from troubled teenager to a man of precarious stability who imagines himself an agent of history. When "history" presents itself in the form of two disgruntled CIA operatives who decide that an unsuccessful attempt on the life of the president will galvanize the nation against communism, the scales are irrevocably tipped.
Author of the National Book Award-winning All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy is one of the most provocative American stylists to emerge in the last century. The striking novel Blood Meridian offers an unflinching narrative of the brutality that accompanied the push west on the 1850s Texas frontier.
In September 1960, John Steinbeck and his poodle, Charley, embarked on a journey across America, from small towns to growing cities to glorious wilderness oases. Travels with Charley is animated by Steinbeck’s attention to the specific details of the natural world and his sense of how the lives of people are intimately connected to the rhythms of nature—to weather, geography, the cycles of the seasons. His keen ear for the transactions among people is evident, too, as he records the interests and obsessions that preoccupy the Americans he encounters along the way.
Paul Auster's signature work, The New York Trilogy, consists of three interlocking novels: City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room - haunting and mysterious tales that move at the breathless pace of a thriller.
This magnificent novel by one of America's finest writers is the epic of one man's remarkable journey, set in 19th-century America against the background of a vanishing people and a rich way of life. At the age of 12, under the Wind Moon, Will is given a horse, a key, and a map, and sent alone into the Indian Nation to run a trading post as a bound boy. It is during this time that he grows into a man, learning, as he does, of the raw power it takes to create a life, to find a home.
Since their mother's death, Tip and Teddy Doyle have been raised by their loving, possessive, and ambitious father. As the former mayor of Boston, Bernard Doyle wants to see his sons in politics, a dream the boys have never shared. But when an argument in a blinding New England snowstorm inadvertently causes an accident that involves a stranger and her child, all Bernard Doyle cares about is his ability to keep his children, all of his children, safe.
Augie is a poor but exuberant boy growing up in Chicago during the Depression. While his friends all settle into chosen professions, Augie demands a special destiny. He tests out a wild succession of occupations, proudly rejecting each as too limiting - until he tangles with the glamorous perfectionist Thea.
In the aftermath of the Civil War, an aging itinerant news reader agrees to transport a young captive of the Kiowa back to her people in this exquisitely rendered, morally complex, multilayered novel of historical fiction from the author of Enemy Women that explores the boundaries of family, responsibility, honor, and trust.
It's 2011, and Samuel Andresen-Anderson - college professor, stalled writer - has a Nix of his own: his mother, Faye. He hasn't seen her in decades, not since she abandoned the family when he was a boy. Now she's reappeared, having committed an absurd crime that electrifies the nightly news, beguiles the Internet, and inflames a politically divided country. The media paints Faye as a radical hippie with a sordid past, but as far as Samuel knows, his mother was an ordinary girl who married her high school sweetheart.
Cormac McCarthy, best-selling author of National Book Award winner All the Pretty Horses, delivers his first new novel in seven years. Written in muscular prose, No Country for Old Men is a powerful tale of the West that moves at a blistering pace.
Tom Wolfe's best-selling modern classic tells the story of Sherman McCoy, an elite Wall Street bond trader who has it all: wealth, power, prestige, a Park Avenue apartment, a beautiful wife, and an even more beautiful mistress - until one wrong turn sends Sherman spiraling downward into a humiliating fall from grace. A car accident in the Bronx involving Sherman, his girlfriend, and two young lower-class black men sets a match to the incendiary racial and social tensions of 1980s New York City.
All Denny Malone wants is to be a good cop. He is the "King of Manhattan North", a highly decorated NYPD detective sergeant and the real leader of "Da Force". Malone and his crew are the smartest, the toughest, the quickest, the bravest, and the baddest - an elite special unit given carte blanche to fight gangs, drugs, and guns. Every day and every night for the 18 years he's spent on the job, Malone has served on the front lines, witnessing the hurt, the dead, the victims, the perps.
It is 1934 and the Depression is bearing down when 16-year-old Weldon Avery Holland happens upon infamous criminals Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow after one of their notorious armed robberies. A confrontation with the outlaws ends as Weldon puts a bullet through the rear window of Clyde’s stolen automobile. Ten years later, Second Lieutenant Weldon Holland and his sergeant, Hershel Pine, escape certain death in the Battle of the Bulge and encounter a beautiful young woman named Rosita Lowenstein hiding in a deserted extermination camp.
When Tom Stechschulte lures us with his steady voice into the blighted steel town of Buell, Pennsylvania, Isaac English is on his way out. On Isaac's last night in town, he and his best friend Billy Poe meet up in an abandoned steel mill for some drinks, some laughs20-year-old guy stuff. But what happens to them that night will trap Poe in Buell and send Isaac on the run.
Philipp Meyer's American Rust is a commentary on post-industrial America. Meyer's spare, harsh prose recalls the machismo of Ernest Hemingway and exposes the wounded pride of the men in this story. Each chapter is narrated by a different character, and Stechschulte alters his steely, accent-less voice accordingly, but leaves room in each for a common vulnerability, a confessional tone, that keeps the listener interested.
One by one, Meyer presents the possibility for each character's success or happiness. Isaac scored a 1560 on his SATs. Poe received a football scholarship to college. Isaac's dad moves to Indiana for a better paying job. Poe's mom Grace and the sheriff Bud Harris just might make it as a couple. Isaac's sister Leigh made it to Yale.
And one by one, every single character's hopes are diminished, but not by any single devastating incident. Over a long period of time, through overexposure to harsh sunlight and cold, driving rain, we listen as this steel town rusts.
While rust serves in this novel primarily as a metaphor for the atrophy of American industrial society, the listener is also reminded that rust binds metals together. It is indeed the hope that Isaac and Poe have in each otherthrough all the hardship that follows the night in the millthat makes American Rust well worth the listen. ;Sarah Evans Hogeboom
Left alone to care for his aging father after his mother commits suicide and his sister escapes to Yale, Isaac English longs for a life beyond his hometown. But when he finally sets out to leave for good, accompanied by his temperamental best friend, former high school football star Billy Poe, they are caught up in a terrible act of violence that changes their lives forever.
Evoking John Steinbeck's novels of restless lives during the Great Depression, American Rust takes us into the contemporary American heartland at a moment of profound unrest and uncertainty about the future. It is a dark but lucid vision, a moving novel about the bleak realities that battle our desire for transcendence and the power of love and friendship to redeem us.
Probably 4.5 corroded stars. An amazing first novel that spins a web of despair and desperation set in a degraded rust belt town that is still in the midst of the Fall. It is a novel of hard compromises, silent heros, and people that grind on every day knowing the sun for them will not rise tomorrow. This is a great American novel that narrates the things we all do to survive in a universe that is slowly growing cold. It is written for and about the people we rely on to survive, those we hurt and the people we leave behind.
American Rust is (and this is absolutely not original) like J.D. Salinger's Glass family had been taken from 1940s Manhattan and dropped unceremoniously into a Cormac McCarthy novel. I still can't get over the fact that this was a first novel. Tom Stechschulte delivers an amazing performance in this 3rd person, split-personality narration where almost every character is a jumble of stream of conscious inner monologues.
23 of 24 people found this review helpful
This novel combines engaging characters, great atmosphere, insights into sobering socio-economic change, fine writing and a plot that grows more compelling as the story unfolds.
Early on, one fear might be that the whole thing will be just too depressing to stick with. In a dying town in a region where a once great (if cruel) industrial civilization is collapsing (and returning to nature), two young men get themselves into grim trouble. There seems no hope for anyone involved, all of whom seem to be making one bad choice after another.
But the characters, the boys Issac and Billy Poe, Billy's mom Grace, Issac's sister Lee and most especially the sheriff Harris, quickly grow on the listener, and their stories become riveting and make the story well worth hanging with while it's power fully kicks in. What follows is more complex, more surprising and more satisfying than you might expect from the early going.
Some synopses of this novel suggest that there is some heart warming 'us against the world' friendship binding the two mismatched main characters. The reality is far less rosy/cliched but ultimately more believable.
This novel offers a deep and rewarding look at harsh changes in the fortunes of a part of America, propelled by excellent story telling and finely rendered, very real characters. Highly recommended.
The narrator is very good; he reminds me of the superlative Ron McLarty.
8 of 8 people found this review helpful
I grew up and live in southwestern Pennsylvania. I'm from a family of steel workers. I watched my father, uncles and my husband loose their jobs when the factories went under. I was a part of this : families falling apart and Loosing everything. Geographic , chronology and demographics are all right on. My mind vividly depicted the settings as the characters drifted through each scene. This book really hit home. A keeper !
4 of 4 people found this review helpful
I get what Phillip Meyer was trying to do-capture American economic angst by using the rust belt as a motif. But the metaphor was too simple and too overdone. The story was good. Think Jack Kerouac mixed with the TV prison drama Oz mixed with Jerry Springer white trash love. It's compelling enough, but I went into this after reading on Wikipedia (of all places)
that this was considered a 'great American novel'. I came away 12 hours later entertained, but by no means blown away.
5 of 6 people found this review helpful
Any additional comments?
The story seemed really dull and undeveloped, I'm afraid. I'd really enjoyed The Son, and American Rust left me very disappointed by its blandness.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful
If you could sum up American Rust in three words, what would they be?
This review includes a spoiler.
Which character – as performed by Tom Stechschulte – was your favorite?
POE
Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?
Prison scene when Poe had to decide whether to beat up the guard. I wondered how he would get out of that.
Any additional comments?
Great Narration. SPOILER SPOILER Ok. I don't get why Grace had to go away for a while, can someone tell me? And, was the trailer actually burned, or was that part of a flashback. Also, why would the revolver not be traced to Harris?
1 of 1 people found this review helpful
I was blown away by this book. Beautiful stream of consciousness storytelling, complex characters, a fantastic story. I hope this author has more books so i can listen to them all
1 of 1 people found this review helpful
What did you love best about American Rust?
Gritty narrative, excellent depiction of cultural demise.
What did you like best about this story?
The way relatively good people find themselves severely compromised.
Which character – as performed by Tom Stechschulte – was your favorite?
Billy Poe.
Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?
No. Some passages were worth mulling over.
Any additional comments?
A lot of passive verbs. Whatever, I don't write that well...
1 of 1 people found this review helpful
The initial commentary (header)comparing American Rust with Steinbeck is successful as both authors have the ability to characterize periods in American history (the dust bowl, Monterey's Cannery Row and rust belt). The difference in my mind is that while Steinbeck remains hopeful, the same cannot easily be said of American Rust. Louise picked up on this when she felt the characters were depressing which they are. Maybe this is the difference between the 30's depression and todays being the lack of hope or joy. A more successful book coming from a similar rural setting but with more likible characters is Richard Russo's Bridge of Sighs. It is amazing to see how authors can look at the same scene and come up with entirely different POVs. Almost like Monet and Picasso looking at bunch of flowers. Thus this ability to assimilate the same environment and then interpret it so differently is not restricted soley to the fine arts.
8 of 12 people found this review helpful
A hard time in a young persons life
Because your just out of hi school.
I time to grow up to make up your mind. Do I go to college, Do I stay home and help a a sick Dad. Do I take
A football scholarship. Two buddy's
roaming the land one more time before making up there minds.