Against the Country: A Novel
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.89 (549 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 1400062691 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 336 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2013-10-15 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
. He was for many years the literary editor of Harper’s Magazine. His writing has appeared in The Baffler, Harper's Magazine, The Best American Essays, and elsewhere. Ben Metcalf (1966–?) was born in Illinois and raised in that state and later in rural Virginia. He has since taught at Columbia University’s School of the Arts
The result is a literary tour de force that raises the question: Was there ever a narrator, in all our literature, so precise, so far-reaching, so eloquently misanthropic, as the one encountered here?Praise for Against the Country“Iconoclastic Against the Country has obvious affinities to Southern Gothic, both in its voice and in the delight it takes in rural ignorance and grotesqueries. A country cousin of David Foster Wallace.”—The New York Times Book Review“Exceptional in its verbal brilliance and conscientiousness, Against the Country involves us in a family’s anguished and hilarious struggle against the strange dooms that seem peculiar to white rural America. NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY VULTURE AND ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR • Against the Country is a gift for fans of Southe
No plot, little merit, plenty of author ego Hector Asuipe Whereas this novel (is it a novel or a semblance of David Foster Wallace-esque metafiction (the parenthetic implications throughout suggest doubt (and said parenthetical usage is flawed at points where they run on so long either the author intentionally "forgot" to close them or the copy editor lost count in some of the laborious constructions) as the author himself likes to pretend to pretend (and then pretends that the pretending is pretending) that really does not measure up to DFW quality because he (DFW) used complex struct. BORING Gloria Nicholson Sentence goes on and onbla,bla and blaboring. Anthony E. Sacco said Five Stars. Some of the most brilliant writing you will find out therenot always easy, but always amazing.
Rather, readers are sucked into winding, wordy paragraphs that pulse from eloquent reflections on topics as diverse as religion and whipping sticks. From School Library Journal "Town" is the place left behind, the place where our narrator might have grown up in something approximate to sanity, if life had gone differently. The boy's story is not told in a linear format. Instead, this is the story of a boy taken from Town and transported by his parents to rural Virginia, a hellish place where children are treated like mules and miseries are as numerous as flies. For others, the novelty of the text may be short-lived. The experience of riding the school bus, for example, includes sentences like "I wonder: When the great root below us inspired in Thomas Jefferson his idyllic hallucinations, and began to grow its system westward