Mother Of Sorrows - Hardcover

McCann, Richard

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679411763 ISBN 13: 9780679411765

Publisher: Pantheon Books, 2005

Synopsis

A man looks back at growing up in the post-World War II suburbs of Washington, D.C., in a family dominated by his much loved mother after the death of his father when he is eleven years old and his struggle to escape the complex relationships of family to build a life of his own.

About this title

Review:

"Mother of Sorrows is almost unbearably beautiful. It is, purely and simply, the real thing -- a work of fiction so intricately felt, so magnificently written, that it can stand unembarrassed beside the mystery of life itself."-Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours

"Some of the cleanest, most elegant and unfussy prose I've read in ages. . . . [It] is, on one level, a gay coming-of-age narrative, and as such it ranks among the best. . . . But the ruling metaphors here are more universal: concealment and disclosure, assertion and invisibility." -James Marcus, Los Angeles Times Book Review

"The voice in McCann's Mother of Sorrows is purely his own -- lyrical, melancholy, precise, refined." -Newsday

"McCann holds such an exquisitely bright light over the landscape of 1950s suburban Maryland and the coming of age of his emotionally fragile, unnamed protagonist who appears in each interlocking story that the resulting book feels almost combustible. . . [His] prose is full of achingly sensual detail and imagery." -The Washington Post Book World

About the Author:

Richard McCann’s work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, Tin House, and Ploughshares, and in many anthologies, including Best American Essays 2000. He is the author of Ghost Letters, a book of poems. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and from the Fulbright and Rockefeller Foundations. He lives in Washington, D.C., where he co-directs the graduate program in creative writing at American University.

About this edition

• Publisher: Pantheon Books
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0679411763
• ISBN 13: 9780679411765
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 196