Beautiful Children: A Novel - Hardcover

Bock, Charles

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1400066506 ISBN 13: 9781400066506

Publisher: Random House Inc, 2008

Synopsis

The disappearance of twelve-year-old Newell Ewing and the resulting mystery brings together the lives of a group of seemingly unrelated strangers in Las Vegas--including his parents, an illustrator, a stripper, a teenage anarchist, and a group of street runaways. A first novel. 30,000 first printing.

About this title

Review:

Ravishing and raw... What should be said of the results of his labors? One word: bravo"

and, as corruptly compelling as Vegas, and as beautiful as the illusions its characters cling to for survival

(New York Times Book Review)

Has great energy and some lovely writing. Bears comparison to Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections or Richard Ford's Frank Bascombe novels.

It shares with these books the sharp eye for the minutiae of domestic arrangements,

the excess of detail mirroring the way consumer materialism shapes the interpersonal

transactions of the middle-class American home, and a sense of elegy for how the

promise of the American Dream more often than not (at least in literature) seems to get lost.

(Sydney Morning Herald)

'It's wholly original - dirty, fast and hypnotic. The sentences flicker and skip and whirl, like the neon city Bock writes about. It will change the way you look at Las Vegas' (Esquire Magazine (US))

Rich and compelling (LA Times)

The brilliant sentence-on-sentence prose gives the book its power an impressive novel (The London Paper)

Beautiful Children careens from the seedy to the beautiful, the domestic to the epic, all with huge and exacting heart. (Jonathan Safran Foer)

It is stunning, near genius. Beautiful Children is brutal, erotic and like a wild potentially dangerous rideit could crash at any moment. The language has a rhythm wholly its owna nervous kind of be-bob. It is as though Bock saved up everything for this momenta major new talent. (A. M. Homes)

Beautiful Children is a fucking mind-blower! It is so good practically every sentence shines. You've got a sensation on your hands. (Sean Wilsey, author of Oh The Glory Of It All)

Beautiful Children is one of the finest first novels I have ever read. Brilliant, simmering, erotic, this dark adventure takes the world apart and offers it to you, piece by heart-stopping piece. (Allison Smith, author of Name all the Animals)

Charles Bock takes us somewhere in Beautiful Children that most of us would be afraid to go alone: across the neon deserts of the new west and into an underworld that is the world. Follow him. This is a journey, and a novel, that allows us no turning back. (Walter Kirn, author of Thumbsucker and Up In The Air)

Book Description:

A post-modern Catcher in the Rye

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House Inc
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 1400066506
• ISBN 13: 9781400066506
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 417