The stories in this outstanding debut collection explore the troubled
relationships of men down on their luck, in failed marriages, estranged from family, caught in imbroglios between sons and their fathers and stepfathers, and even, in Wild America, the subtle and ferocious competition between teenage girls.
Bob Monroe, the protagonist of The Brown Coast, loses his job, his inheritance and his wife after the death of his father. The narrator of Down Through the Valley, meanwhile, is persuaded to drive his ex-wife's boyfriend home from an ashram after he injures himself.
In Leopard, the threat of a missing pet leopard lurking in the woods hints at a troubled 11-year-old's rage toward his stepfather. The narrator of Down Through the Valley has a savage freak-out that terrifies him. The strange and magnificent title story, in which Vikings set off again toward an oft-raided island,...
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The stories in this outstanding debut collection explore the troubled
relationships of men down on their luck, in failed marriages, estranged from family, caught in imbroglios between sons and their fathers and stepfathers, and even, in Wild America, the subtle and ferocious competition between teenage girls.
Bob Monroe, the protagonist of The Brown Coast, loses his job, his inheritance and his wife after the death of his father. The narrator of Down Through the Valley, meanwhile, is persuaded to drive his ex-wife's boyfriend home from an ashram after he injures himself.
In Leopard, the threat of a missing pet leopard lurking in the woods hints at a troubled 11-year-old's rage toward his stepfather. The narrator of Down Through the Valley has a savage freak-out that terrifies him. The strange and magnificent title story, in which Vikings set off again toward an oft-raided island, beautifully ties the collection together in its heartbreaking final paragraph.
Tower's uncommon mastery of tone and wide-ranging sympathy creates a fine tension between wry humor and the primal rage that seethes just below the surface of each of his characters.
Rewiews:
"We eagerly devour these tales not for their story lines but for Mr. Tower?s masterly
conjuring of his people?s daily existence, his understanding of their emotional
dilemmas, his controlled but dazzling language and his effortless ability to turn
snapshots of misfits and malcontents into a panoramic cavalcade of American life." / The
New York Times
"Anincredible talent...It sometimes feels as if there?s nothing Tower can?t render in
arresting fashion...Tower?s prose is a welcome reminder that the first job of the
fiction writer is to introduce the reader to worlds both new and familiar in ways they
wouldn?t have arrived at on their own...Tower writes with spellbinding virtuosity...One
suspects we?ll be hearing his name - which invokes prose that is both soaring and deep -
for a long time to come." / Los Angeles Times Book Review
"Consistently artful and funny and empathetic...Tower, who grew up in North
Carolina, has been seeding these stories patiently across magazines and literary
journals over the last ten years or so, quietly building a reputation as a painstaking
stylist devoted to the near - impossible art of highly polished colloquialism. Reading his work piecemeal as it emerged, what stood out most was the lovely warmth of his voice. His sentences are strenuously musical, full of careful detail and surprising metaphors . He has a special talent for channeling the idiosyncrasies of lower-middle-class speech, and his plots often weave around bright little bursts of incidental dialogue. It also feels like something slightly new in the canon of maleness - a little glade or clearing, where the air is slightly different." / Sam Anderson, New York
"Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned is a triumph of a debut - not just
believably generous, but revelatory in its rendering of all the different kinds of hurt
that a human being can sustain in the course of a life." / The New York Observer
"Bittersweet, beautiful, and ardently conflicted...As evidenced by the emotional
punch packed into such brief tales?nine stories in about 250 pages - Tower is almost
incapable of overloading a sentence with an unnecessary word. His style is perfectly
suited to short fiction: ?Down Through the Valley,? in less than twenty pages, is jammed
with more pathos than a four-hundred-page potboiler." / Bookforum
"I had fun reading these stories. I laughed out loud eight times during the first one...and had a silly smile on my face throughout most of them." / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
"An outstanding debut collection...The strange and magnificent title story, in
which Vikings set off again toward an oft-raided island, beautifully ties the collection
together in its heartbreaking final paragraph. Tower?s uncommon mastery of tone and
wide-ranging sympathy creates a fine tension between wry humor and the primal rage that
seethes just below the surface of each of his characters." / Publishers Weekly
"Wells Tower?s stories are written, thrillingly, in authentic American
vernacular?violent, funny, bleak, and beautiful. You need to read them, now." / Michael
Chabon, author of The Yiddish Policemen?s Union and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
"These are lurid, ingenious, beautiful, delicate, and very funny stories. Full of pity
and terror, they are also great fun to read. Wells Tower has written a brilliant book."
/ Benjamin Kunkel, author of Indecision
"Wells Tower is a blindingly brilliant writer who does more than raise the bar for debut
fiction: he hurls it into space. With the oversized heart of George Saunders, the demon
tongue of Barry Hannah, and his very own conjuring tools that cannot here be named,
Tower writes stories of aching beauty that are as crushingly funny and sad as any on the
planet." / Ben Marcus, author of Notable American Women and The Age of Wire and String
