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Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned: Stories
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Product Description
Viking marauders descend on a much-plundered island, hoping some mayhem will shake off the winter blahs. A man is booted out of his home after his wife discovers that the print of a bare foot on the inside of his windshield 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 try to reassemble themselves. His version of America is touched with the seamy splendor of the dropout, the misfit: failed inventors, boozy dreamers, hapless fathers, wayward sons. Combining electric prose with savage wit, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned is a major debut, announcing a voice we have not heard before.
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #18467 in Books
- Published on: 2009-03-17
- Released on: 2009-03-17
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Hardcover
- 256 pages
Features
- ISBN13: 9780374292195
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. 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. Bob Monroe, the protagonist of The Brown Coast, loses his job, his inheritance and his wife after the death of his father. The narrator of Down Through the Valley, meanwhile, is persuaded to drive his ex-wife's boyfriend home from an ashram after he injures himself. In Leopard, the threat of a missing pet leopard lurking in the woods hints at a troubled 11-year-old's rage toward his stepfather. The narrator of Down Through the Valley has a savage freak-out that terrifies him. 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. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Bookmarks Magazine
Critics described this collection as visceral, contemplative, and inappropriately side-splitting, and were captivated by tales of men and their roles as fathers, stepfathers, brothers, sons, husbands, and ex-husbands (only one story featured a female protagonist). Reviewers further marveled at Tower’s ability to take readers from gut-clutching hilarity to gloomy introspection and back again in compact, descriptive language. Although critics disagreed about which stories were the best, only the Boston Globe cited “weaker,” “choppy,” and “overlong” entries. Overall, Tower has created a stunning collection of stories that will linger in the hearts and minds of readers.
Copyright 2009 Bookmarks Publishing LLC
Review
“In Wells Tower’s sad-funny-disturbing stories, the world is a precarious place, where the innocent have bad dreams, and even the not-so-innocent worry about ‘the things the world will do to them’ and their loved ones . . . This arresting debut collection of stories decisively establishes Mr. Tower—a magazine journalist who has also won two Pushcart Prizes—as a writer of uncommon talent, a writer with Sam Shepard’s radar for the violent, surreal convolutions of American society; Frederick Barthelme’s keen ear for contemporary slang; and David Foster Wallace’s eye for the often hilarious absurdities of contemporary life . . . As ‘Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned’ demonstrates, Mr. Tower has an instinctive gift for creating characters with finely calibrated interior lives and an almost Dickensian physical immediacy. His writing can be darkly hilarious and grotesque and yet simultaneously attuned to his people’s sense of loss and bewilderment and frustration . . . We eagerly devour these tales not for their story lines but for Mr. Tower’s masterly conjuring of his people’s daily existence, his understanding of their emotional dilemmas, his controlled but dazzling language and his effortless ability to turn snapshots of misfits and malcontents into a panoramic cavalcade of American life.” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
“[An] incredible talent . . . It sometimes feels as if there’s nothing Tower can’t render in arresting fashion . . . Tower’s prose is a welcome reminder that the first job of the fiction writer is to introduce the reader to worlds both new and familiar in ways they wouldn’t have arrived at on their own . . . Tower writes with spellbinding virtuosity . . . One suspects we’ll be hearing his name—which invokes prose that is both soaring and deep—for a long time to come.” —Jim Ruland, Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Consistently artful and funny and empathetic . . . Tower, who grew up in North Carolina, has been seeding these stories patiently across magazines and literary journals over the last ten years or so, quietly building a reputation as a painstaking stylist devoted to the near-impossible art of highly polished colloquialism. Reading his work piecemeal as it emerged, what stood out most was the lovely warmth of his voice. His sentences are strenuously musical, full of careful detail and surprising metaphors . . . He has a special talent for channeling the idiosyncrasies of lower-middle-class speech, and his plots often weave around bright little bursts of incidental dialogue . . . It also feels like something slightly new in the canon of maleness—a little glade or clearing, where the air is slightly different.” —Sam Anderson, New York
“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
“Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned . . . is a triumph of a debut—not just believably generous, but revelatory in its rendering of all the different kinds of hurt that a human being can sustain in the course of a life.” —Leon Neyfakh, The New York Observer
“In his debut collection, Tower writes about raggedy men, neglected boys, and quarrelsome Vikings who are down on their luck (if they ever had any). But the stories are very funny, and surprising, and possess a rugged beauty.” —Vendela Vida, Vanity Fair
“Bittersweet, beautiful, and ardently conflicted . . . As evidenced by the emotional punch packed into such brief tales—nine stories in about 250 pages—Tower is almost incapable of overloading a sentence with an unnecessary word. His style is perfectly suited to short fiction: ‘Down Through the Valley,’ in less than twenty pages, is jammed with more pathos than a four-hundred-page potboiler.” —Kevin Canfield, Bookforum
“The stories in Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned are the most arresting I’ve read in some time. Tower is adept at capturing the many ways men can be unhappy, lonely, stymied or adrift, and his language has the virtuoso inventiveness of Barry Hannah, that magic-trick quality that can make a description of an overcast sky feel new and strange . . . His characters come across like aliens, possessing the kind of maverick weirdness that marks them as real people rather than types . . . He’s also got a knack for pacing and a hell of a sense of humor. I so enjoyed ‘The Brown Coast,’ the collection’s first story, I read it twice before proceeding through the rest of the book.” —Taylor Antrim, The Daily Beast
“I had fun reading these stories. I laughed out loud eight times during the first one . . . and had a silly smile on my face throughout most of them.” —Charles E. May, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“[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
“Sharply funny, obliquely devastating.” —Grady McFerrin, Best Life
“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
Customer Reviews
marvelous and original language and situations
I started to read this book skeptically, but from the first story found myself completely disarmed. My favorite stories are "Retreat" and "Wild America," both gorgeously unexpected treatments of their subjects (in the first, sibling relationships, and in the second adolescent girls and sexual discovery). Nothing I could say about the way Wells Tower goes into his stories could possibly prepare you for the surprising pleasures of his language. He's always funny without sneering or being self-satisfied in his conclusions regarding this big messy thing, "American culture." He's sly and humble. But his sentences--the core of any literary enterprise as far as I'm concerned--are at the crux of his art. Carefully wrought, they approximate the uniqueness and the varieties of personal experience. And did I mention how funny he is? Anyone who cares about word choice or a fresh eye trained on the observations he makes (in the tradition of Joy Williams or Richard Yates, say) will read them aloud more than once and chuckle. Beautiful.
Decorations in an Empty Room
I agree with another review here: The Times really piled it on, and made me expect the second coming of Cheever and Chekov combined. The stories were solid and unique but far from outstanding. I found them long on punchy word choices but short on depth. For example, bugs stuck to a truck's grill are "stuccoed" there; rather than waving an object in somebody's face, a character "wands" it, which isn't a verb and doesn't really make sense except by association, calling to mind the waving of a wand. The stories are long on these snappy stylistics, and short on emotional depth and glaringly lacking in demonstrating any real understanding of human emotional complexity. I'm not levelling that at Tower himself, but at the narratives. Everything about the characters is shown, or attempted to be shown, through action, props, events, and dialogue. This is not a technical fault, because plenty can be accomplished that way, but there is little richness between the lines. What do his bumbling, dysfunctional Floridian carnies feel? We don't know. The narrator doesn't know. Does Tower know?
The first story is the strongest. "On the Show" really baffled and even embarassed this reader, calling to mind the hallmarks of amatuer fiction so often encountered in workshops: episodes, events, and people connected by physical promixity but otherwise disunited by any thematic thread. It's the writers job to do a little bit of weaving, and that has been forsaken or skipped here. "On the Show" has an ending in which the material just stops, seemingly because the author ran out of stuff to have happen. The last sentence is a nutty image, like the dozens and dozens of images provided along the way, and the last one has no special resonsance for being the last. It reads like that Beck song on "The Information" where the drums just stop and the guitar strums a few more chords, and then you hear Beck at the soundboard answering a call from someone in the house: "What? Dinner? Oh, okay." Silence. Tower did his thing along the way, showing people sexually abusing a child, smoking herion out of tinfoil, being large like a giant, having a disagreement with a step-father. Hope you liked it, because that's what it was.
A lack of compassion for his characters and narrative ungenerousness from an author I find distasteful, especially when there is evidence of effort and intention in the quirky words choices. But in a barren emotional context, these verbal oddities come to seem like decorations in an empty room.
A bit over-rated
These stories are extremely good, but the reviews in the NY Times are too laudatory. The writing is spectacular in many places, pop-culture generated grammatical slips aside in a few spots, and the voice is strong.
I found a low level of emotional depth in most of the stories and I was surprised by the experience given the writing.
