Corpus Christi Synopsis
FROM THE ACCLAIMED AUTHOR OF REMEMBER ME LIKE THIS ('excellent' The Sunday Times - 'beautiful' Observer) Corpus Christi is 'A GORGEOUS, ACCOMPLISHED DEBUT' DAVID MITCHELL (Independent Books of the Year) In Corpus Christi, Texas - a town often hit by hurricanes - parents, children, and lovers come together and fall apart, bonded and battered by memories of loss that they feel as acutely as physical pain. A car accident joins strangers linked by an intimate knowledge of madness. A teenage boy remembers his father's act of sudden and self-righteous violence. A 'hurricane party' reunites a couple whom tragedy parted. And, in an unforgettable three-story cycle, an illness heals a man's relationship with his mother and reveals the odd, shifting fidelity of truth to love. Told in fresh, lyrical voices and taut, inventive styles, these narratives explore the complex volatility of love and intimacy, sorrow and renewal. Writing with tough humor, deep humanity, and a keen eye for the natural environment, Bret Anthony Johnston creates a world where cataclysmic events cut people loose from their 'regular lives, floating and spiraling away from where we had been the day before.' --- The extraordinarily ambitious debut of one of contemporary American most exquisitely talented voices, now available from Two Roads in a new paperback edition.
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Bret Anthony Johnston Press Reviews
'A gorgeous, accomplished debut.' -- David Mitchell The Independent (Books of the Year)
'Stunning and complex... It's hurricane country, and Johnston's exquisitely drawn men and women are riders on the storm, coping with an iffy emotional landscape that mirrors Corpus Christi's own, where the past is too easily washed away and the ocean has no memory.' Los Angeles Times
'Hard-eyed, life-affirming... These stories are relentlessly sober, large-hearted, and intense. In their pathos, to quote C. S. Lewis on Chaucer, every fluctuation of gnawing hope, every pitiful subterfuge of the flattering imagination, is held up to our eyes without mercy (The Allegory of Love); and yet their effect is spiritually bracing. We are human to the last.' Boston Sunday Globe
'Fans of Raymond Carver's spare, carefully crafted stories will rejoice... [Johnston has] a pitch-perfect ear for dialogue and a dead-on eye for conjuring an entire universe with one simple detail... His ten stories are individual gems... Johnston's genius lies in weaving a web of optimism around a series of difficult topics. If [these stories] are read as they seem destined to be - obsessively, in one sitting - their rapt audience will turn the last page with a profound sense of calm.' San Francisco Chronicle
'In the mold of Denis Johnson, Ian McEwan, and Barry Gifford, Johnston is a writer of stories that peel away the soul of a man, sometimes with quaking fingers, other times with a hunting knife. The stories are sometimes spastically violent, other times uncommonly delicate, but always memorable. Pages Compelling and haunting... Johnston's evocative descriptions of events, feelings, and Corpus Christi itself connect readers to his characters and their dilemmas and reactions to tragedy.' Library Journal
'[A] promising debut collection... astutely observed... Johnston's Corpus is America in microcosm. But it is the emotional landscape that interests the author, not the physical, and, without lapsing into sentimentality, he evokes a peculiarly American brand of abject loneliness and tentative optimism.' Publishers Weekly
About Bret Anthony Johnston
Bret Anthony Johnston is the author of the award-winning Corpus Christi: Stories, which was described by David Mitchell as 'a gorgeous, accomplished debut', and was named a Best Book of the Year by the Independent and the Irish Times, and the novel Remember Me Like This, a New York Times Editor's Choice and one of the Observer's best Holiday Reads 2014. His work appears in the Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, the Paris Review, the Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he's the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship and a 5 Under 35 honor from the National Book Foundation. He teaches in the Bennington Writing Seminars and at Harvard University, where he is the Director of Creative Writing. bretanthonyjohnston.com Facebook/BAJbooks
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