Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned

I know I haven't been the most active reader the last couple months myself (unless you count the innumerable number of crappy essays 100 or so students have been throwing at me all semester) but I won't let this experiment go down on my watch. My next selection, the book I'm adding to the blog pipeline, is Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower.

I chose this for several reasons, but the main one is that we haven't discussed short fiction here yet and I think the blog format lends itself well to a conversation about this type of writing. EREB consists of 9 different self-contained stories and hopefully we can create a thread for each of them. Read one, read none, read them all, whatever works for you. My goal once the semester ends in a few weeks is to catch up on some of the reading I've missed and start on a discussion in EREB in one month's time.

I've read a few of the stories already and what is really striking is the synthesis of comedy and tragedy. The book has been generally heralded with rave reviews. Here are some things:

From the Publisher:

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 car's 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. Wells Tower's version of America is touched with the seamy splendor of the dropout, the misfit: failed inventors, boozy dreamers, hapless fathers, wayward sons. With electric prose and savage wit, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned is a profound new collection of stories.

From some blurbs:

• "Well's Tower's stories are written, thrillingly, in authentic American vernacular--violent, funny, bleak, and beautiful. You need to read them, now." - Michael Chabon
• "There 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
• "Wells Tower is a blindingly brilliant writer who does more than just raise the bar for debut fiction: he hurls it into space. With the oversize 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

Also, an interview with Tower on Bookslut and, strangely, an animated short I found on Youtube based on an excerpt/adaptation from the title story:




Finally, if you don't want to shell out the cash, you can read the title story in pdf form here and as well a different story from the collection (which is told in the challenging Second Person Limited), "Leopard," as it appears online where it was originally published in the New Yorker. You can read and discuss those puppies for free!