A Washington Post Top 50 Fiction Book for 2014
Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award finalist
In Mr.Tall, his first story collection in two decades, Tony Earley brings us seven rueful, bittersweet, riotous studies of characters both ordinary and mythical, seeking to make sense of the world transforming around them. He demonstrates once again the prodigious storytelling gifts that have made him one of the most accomplished writers of his generation.
In the title story, a lonely young bride terrifyingly shares a remote mountain valley with a larger-than-life neighbor, while the grieving widow of "The Cryptozoologist" is sure she's been visited by a Southern variant of Bigfoot. "Have You Seen the Stolen Girl?" introduces us to the ghost of Jesse James, who plagues an elderly woman in the wake of a neighborhood girl's abduction. In "Haunted Castles of the Barrier Islands" a newly empty-nest couple stumbles through an impenetrable Outer Banks fog seeking a new life to replace the one they have lost, while "Yard Art" follows the estranged wife of a famous country singer as she searches for an undiscovered statue by an enigmatic artist. In the concluding novella, "Jack and the Mad Dog," we find Jack-the giant killer of the stories-in full flight from threats both canine and existential.
Earley indelibly maps previously undiscovered territories of the human heart in these melancholy, comic, and occasionally strange stories. Along the way he leads us on a journey from contemporary Nashville to a fantastical land of talking dogs and flying trees, teaching us at every step that, even in the most familiar locales, the ordinary is never just that.
Eight years ago, readers everywhere fell in love with Jim Glass, the precocious ten-year-old at the heart of Jim the Boy. Now a teenager, Jim returns in a tender and wise story of young love on the brink of World War Two.
Jim Glass has fallen in love, as only a teenage boy can fall in love, with his classmate Chrissie Steppe. Unfortunately, Chrissie is Bucky Bucklaw's girlfriend, and Bucky has joined the navy on the eve of war. Jim vows to win Chrissie's heart in Bucky's absence, but the war makes high school less than a safe haven and gives a young man's emotions a grown man's gravity. When Bucky returns to Aliceville a fallen hero, Jim finds himself adrift in a once-familiar town where everything, including Chrissie, seems to be changing.
With the uncanny insight into the well-intentioned heart that made Jim the Boy a modern classic, Tony Earley has fashioned a nuanced and unforgettable portrait of America in another time, making it feel even more real than our own day. This is a moving story of discovery, loss, and growing up, showing again that Tony Earley's writing 'radiates with a largeness of heart' (Esquire).
From the Compact Disc edition.
Tony Earley has a voice and a sensibility that cuts to the heart of the way we live today. He’s not smug, he’s not self-consciously hip, he’s not flashy. He writes in a deceptively simple style, yet his work reveals a complex mind, a empathetic heart, and a questing spirit.
In Somehow Form a Family, Earley writes about finding a place in a world without losing sight of where you came from. In his late 30s, he is neither a Boomer nor a GenXer. He stands with one foot in the rural South and one foot in the ersatz suburbia of the Brady Bunch. Candidly discussing his struggles with clinical depression, he confronts the big issues—God, death, civilization, family—with grace and wit, without glibness or evasion. Whether he’s imagining his mountaineer grandmother’s only foray into the wider world, tracking ghosts with a parapsychologist and finding his dead sister, or dodging suicide, Earley has clearly lost patience with the knee-jerk irony so prevalent around young writers today. His is a journey into authenticity, from faith through unbelief and into a new faith—a journey “toward whatever miracle comes up next.”
Jim the Boy is a coming-of-age novel by Tony Earley. It details a year in the life of Jim Glass, who lives, with his mother and three uncles, in the small fictional town of Aliceville, North Carolina in 1934 during the Great Depression.
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