Everything Ravaged Everything Burned

Everything Ravaged Everything Burned

by WellsTower (Author)

Synopsis

A man is booted out of his home after his wife discovers that the sweat-smudged footprint on the inside of his windscreen doesn't match her own. Teenage cousins, drugged by summer, meet with a reckoning in the woods. A boy runs off to the carnival after his stepfather bites him in a brawl. In the stories of Wells Tower, families fall apart and messily, hilariously try to reassemble themselves. His characters - marauding Vikings, washed-up entrepreneurs, and jobbing hacks on local papers - are adrift from the mainstream, confused by contemporary masculinity, angry and aimless. Combining electric prose with compassion and dark wit, this is a major debut.

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 240
Publisher: Granta Books
Published: 01 Apr 2010

ISBN 10: 1847081207
ISBN 13: 9781847081209

Media Reviews
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'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 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
[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 (starred review and Pick of the Week)
The title barely hints at the scorched-earth, take-no-prisoners power of the stories. -- Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
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
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
[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 (starred review and Pick of the Week)
The title barely hints at the scorched-earth, take-no-prisoners power of the stories. -- Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
Tower's debut story collection confirms what readers of Harper's, McSweeney's, The Paris Review, and other major publications have known for some time: Tower is a serious talent . . . Tower's voice is honest and strange, humorous and insightful. --Kevin Clouther, Booklist
Outstanding . . . Tower has crafted a powerful and assured debut collection. --Lawrence Rungren, Library Journal
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
Author Bio
Tower was born in Vancouver in 1973. He has been the recipient of the Paris Review Discovery Prize, two Pushcart Prizes and a Henfield Foundation award. He lives in New York