Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England

Clarke, Brock

WINDMILL

Lamar Kerry, Jr., is an unlikely hero. At twenty-seven years old he can't dance unless he's had more than a few drinks. His wardrobe is uninspired, at best. He has returned after college to Little Falls, his miserable, working-class hometown in upstate New York, deflating everyone's expectations of him in so doing. He's over-educated, overconfident, fundamentally bright, but mostly going nowhere. When the town's only Latino, Lamar's former high school classmate, goes missing and is feared dead, Lamar--done with being a disappointment to his father and his girlfriend--decides to break out of the ordinary by solving the case, the roots of which may be in the town's racist undercurrent. Will the ordinary white boy achieve the extraordinary in Little Falls? In a voice both tender and biting, Brock Clarke mingles subtle social criticism with laugh-out-loud funny observations, crafting in Lamar a character both unforgettable and universal, a character that will live long and proud in American literature.

The Ordinary White Boy

Literature & Fiction

Mariner Books

Title: An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England Binding: Paperback Author: BrockClarke Publisher: AlgonquinBooksofChapelHill

An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England

Computers & Technology

Networking & Cloud Computing

Algonquin Books Of Chapel Hill

The stories in this collection occupy a world at once as familiar as a suburban backyard or a southern college’s hallowed football field and as strange as a man who buys Savannah, Georgia, and tries to turn it into the perfect Southern city as part of his attempt to win back his estranged wife. The fictional territory of Carrying the Torch, is in short, Brock Clarke’s, one in which the surreal and the hilarious share a neighborhood with the painfully real and the sweetly ironic. Here readers will encounter characters dislocated by work and love, by huge losses and life’s small dramas, men and women who have migrated South in search of redemption—or at least in the hope of leaving the worst behind. In these tales about what people try to leave and find they can’t, about the lies we tell the people we love and the myths we create to make life livable, Marly Swick cites an “exceptional originality” as well as an “amazing emotional resonance, a haunting quality.” “Notable for their balance of sentiment and restraint, the music of their language, and the haunting human longing that coexists with the irony and the humor,” as Lee Martin remarks, these remarkable stories carry forward a tradition reaching from Flannery O’Connor to John Cheever and Donald Barthelme—and arrive at a brilliance all their own.

Carrying the Torch: Stories

Short Stories & Anthologies

University Of Nebraska Press

Humor & Satire

Thorndike Pr

A lot of remarkable things have happened in the life of Sam Pulsifer, the hapless hero of this incendiary novel, beginning with the ten years he spent in prison for accidentally burning down Emily Dickinson's house and unwittingly killing two people. emerging at age twenty-eight, he creates a new life and identity as a husband and father. But when the homes of other famous New England writers suddenly go up in smoke, he must prove his innocence by uncovering the identity of this literary-minded arsonist. In the league of such contemporary classics as A Confederacy of Dunces and The World According to Garp, An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England is an utterly original story about truth and honesty, life and the imagination.

An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England: A Novel

United States

Algonquin Books

For young Miller Le Ray, life has become a search. A search for his dad, who may or may not have joined the army and gone to Iraq. A search for a notorious (and, unfortunately, deceased) writer, Frederick Exley, author of the “fictional memoir” A Fan’s Notes, who may hold the key to bringing Miller’s father back. But most of all, his is a search for truth. As Miller says, “Sometimes you have to tell the truth about some of the stuff you’ve done so that people will believe you when you tell them the truth about other stuff you haven’t done.” In Exley as in his previous bestselling novel, An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England, Brock Clarke takes his reader into a world that is both familiar and disorienting, thought-provoking and thoroughly entertaining. Told by Miller and Dr. Pahnee, both unreliable narrators, it becomes an exploration of the difference between what we believe to be real and what is in fact real.

Exley

"Funny, profound . . . a seductive book with a payoff on every page."—People A lot of remarkable things have happened in the life of Sam Pulsifer, the hapless hero of this incendiary novel, beginning with the ten years he spent in prison for accidentally burning down Emily Dickinson's house and unwittingly killing two people. emerging at age twenty-eight, he creates a new life and identity as a husband and father. But when the homes of other famous New England writers suddenly go up in smoke, he must prove his innocence by uncovering the identity of this literary-minded arsonist. In the league of such contemporary classics as A Confederacy of Dunces and The World According to Garp, An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England is an utterly original story about truth and honesty, life and the imagination.

Humor & Entertainment

Humor

“The literary equivalent of a half-court shot . . . Extraordinary.”—NPR For young Miller Le Ray, life has become a search. A search for his dad, who may or may not have joined the army and gone to Iraq. A search for a notorious (and, unfortunately, deceased) writer, Frederick Exley, author of the “fictional memoir” A Fan’s Notes, who may hold the key to bringing Miller’s father back. But most of all, his is a search for truth. As Miller says, “Sometimes you have to tell the truth about some of the stuff you’ve done so that people will believe you when you tell them the truth about other stuff you haven’t done.” In Exley as in his previous bestselling novel, An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England, Brock Clarke takes his reader into a world that is both familiar and disorienting, thought-provoking and thoroughly entertaining. Told by Miller and Dr. Pahnee, both unreliable narrators, it becomes an exploration of the difference between what we believe to be real and what is in fact real.

“This madcap adventure mixes small-town teachers, barkeeps, teenagers, and fry-cooks with international spies, terrorists, and political refugees. But it is the writing itself that is the true star here, as Clarke delves deep into the hidden and mixed emotions we carry for the ones we love, turning out sentence after sentence that will make you stop to admire its clear, crisp daring and perfect delivery. Yes! I thought, as I read these pages. That’s how you write a good book.” —Hannah Tinti, author The Good Thief Take the format of a spy thriller, shape it around real-life incidents involving international terrorism, leaven it with dark, dry humor, toss in a love rectangle, give everybody a gun, and let everything play out in the outer reaches of upstate New York—there you have an idea of Brock Clarke’s new novel, The Happiest People in the World. Who are “the happiest people in the world”? Theoretically, it’s all the people who live in Denmark, the country that gave the world Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales and the open-face sandwich. But Denmark is also where some political cartoonists got into very unhappy trouble when they attempted to depict Muhammad in their drawings, which prompted protests, arson, and even assassination attempts. Imagine, then, that one of those cartoonists, given protection through the CIA, is relocated to a small town in upstate New York where he is given a job as a high school guidance counselor. Once there, he manages to fall in love with the wife of the high school principal, who himself is trying to get over the effects of a misguided love affair with the very CIA agent who sent the cartoonist to him. Imagine also that virtually every other person in this tiny town is a CIA operative. The result is a darkly funny tale of paranoia and the all-American obsession with security and the conspiracies that threaten it, written in a tone that is simultaneously filled with wonder and anger in almost equal parts.

The Happiest People in the World: A Novel

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Books by Clarke, Brock

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Clarke, Brock. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England

The Ordinary White Boy

An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England

Carrying the Torch: Stories

An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England

An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England: A Novel

Exley

An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England: A Novel

Exley

The Happiest People in the World: A Novel