ISBN: 9780802158826
Editorial: Atlantic Monthly Press
Autor: Butler, Robert Olen
Año de edición: 2021
N° Paginas: 304
Tipo de pasta: Pasta dura
Descripción: A 115-year-old man lies on his deathbed as the 2016 election results arrive, and revisits his life in this moving story of love, fatherhood, and the American century from Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Olen Butler.A visionary and poignant novel centered around former newspaperman Sam Cunningham as he prepares to die, Late City covers much of the early twentieth century, unfurling as a conversation between the dying man and a surprising God. As the two review Sam's life, from his childhood in the American South and his time in the French trenches during World War I to his fledgling newspaper career in Chicago in the Roaring Twenties and the decades that follow, snippets of history are brought sharply into focus.Sam grows up in Louisiana, with a harsh father, who he comes to resent both for his physical abuse and for what Sam eventually perceives as his flawed morality. Eager to escape and prove himself, Sam enlists in the army as a sniper while still underage. The hardness his father instilled in him helps him make it out of World War I alive, but, as he recounts these tales on his deathbed, we come to realize that it also prevents him from contending with the emotional wounds of war. Back in the U.S., Sam moves to Chicago to begin a career as a newspaperman that will bring him close to all the major historical turns of the twentieth century. There he meets his wife and has a son, whose fate counters Sam's at almost every turn.As he contemplates his relationships—with his parents, his brothers in arms, his wife, his editor, and most importantly, his son—Sam is amazed at what he still has left to learn about himself after all these years in this heart-rending novel from the Pulitzer Prize winner.ReviewPraise for Late City:“This grandly retrospective novel warns of the political consequences of failures of personal insight.”—New Yorker“As I devoured the story, I had to wipe away tears more than once. The narrative’s emotional power is fully earned, never manipulated, and Butler’s elegant language is true to the tongue. His research blends so seamlessly into the story that one is inclined, at times, to believe it isn’t fiction at all. Late City is an honest, poignant reckoning of what it means to gaze unblinkingly at our own failings and to find transcendence.”—Historical Novel Society“It’s God, the supercilious wit who rules the center of Late City…While it has a consistently subtle profundity, Late City isn’t exactly a Novel of Ideas — it’s too entertaining and accessible for that, especially with jagged bolts of wry comedy dispensed by God.”—Atlanta Journal-Constitution“An engaging read and a commendable quest into the underpinnings of the complicated, often contradictory American people. More crucially, the novel is a poignant meditation on the circle of life, the wonder we all feel as it slips away.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune“In other novels, notably Perfume River, Butler explores the devastation that war inflicts on individuals. With Late City, he focuses instead on the inner life of one fallible, lovable, redeemable man over 12 tumultuous decades, a soul forever striving to be a right guy.”—Chapter 16“With two dozen remarkably imaginative and empathic fiction titles to his credit, Butler brings preternatural attunement to the spiraling of the mind and ardently honed artistry to this exceptionally nuanced, tender, funny, tragic, and utterly transfixing portrait of a man reflecting on more than a century's worth of horror and wonder.”—Booklist, starred review“A moving tape of love and misunderstanding.”—Publishers WeeklyPraise for Robert Olen Butler:"Butler's prose is fluid, and his handling of his many time-shifts as lucid as it is urgent. His descriptive gifts don't extend just to his characters' traits or their Florida and New Orleans settings, but to the history he's addressing . . . 'You share a war in one way,' Robert thinks. 'You pass it on in another.' Perfume River captures both the
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