Farrar Straus & Giroux
Price: $24.00
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WELLS TOWER
reads from
Everything Ravaged,
Everything Burned: Stories
Harvard Book Store is pleased to welcome award-winning fiction writer WELLS TOWER, whose first collection of stories is garnering raves. “The title barely hints at the scorched-earth, take-no-prisoners power of the stories.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred)
“Wells Tower’s stories are written, thrillingly, in authentic American vernacular—violent, funny, bleak, and beautiful. You need to read them, now.” —Michael Chabon (The Yiddish Policemen’s Union)
“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 (Notable American Women) “We need books like Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned.... What [Tower’s] portraits lack in grandeur, they compensate for in their accuracy . . . [The characters] live the way we Americans do.” —Benjamin Alsup, Esquire
“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.... 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 (starred)
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Wells Tower’s short stories and journalism have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, McSweeney’s, The Paris Review, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, The Washington Post Magazine, and elsewhere. He received two Pushcart Prizes and the Plimpton Prize from The Paris Review. He divides his time between Chapel Hill and Brooklyn.
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