Bring Your Legs with You (Drue Heinz Literature Prize) - Hardcover

Spencer, Darrell

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0822942429 ISBN 13: 9780822942429

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004

Synopsis

A boxer who brings his legs with him comes to the ring with the strength and stamino to make it through every round of a tough fight. In this new collection, winner of the prestigious Drue Heinz Literature Prize, Darrell Spencer delivers fiction with just that kind of power. Bring Your Legs with You contains nine interconnected stories set in Las Vegas. Featuring various perspectives and narrators, they are filled with unforgettable characters, including Carl T. Plugg, a sharp-dressed, smooth-talking, non-hustling pool shark; Spinoza, the philosophical day laborer with ""Department of Big Thoughts"" lettered on the door of his pickup; Jacob, an arrogant lawyer who learns too late the dangers of swimming with the sharks; Gus, a man who has never seen his son fight despite his insatiable fascination with the sweet science; and Jane, a woman wary of her ex-husband, but still in love enough to share her bed with him. Above them all looms Tommy Rooke, retired prizefighter and self-employed roofer. Undefeated in the ring, Rooke walked away from boxing at the top of his game, to the confusion and consternation of his friends and family. As his father, former manager, and various other hangers-on encourage him to stage a comeback, Tommy moves through the gated communities and sun-blasted strip malls of Las Vegas, wrestling with personal choice, the caprices of fate, and the price the gods demand for our sins. More than a book about boxing, gambling, luck, and broken dreams, Bring Your Legs with You delves deeply into the life of its flowed but intelligent hero, a man deeply devoted to his friends but lost in a violent world. A writer unafraid to show the connections between people, Spencer delivers a hard-hitting collection filled with rich dialogue and spare prose.

About this title

Review:

Spencer possesses a remarkable ear for the cadence of everyday speech, as his characters circle and spar and contend with one another in the clinch of family and marriage, friendship and enmity. His depiction of Las Vegas is so fresh and affecting that I will never be able to visit the city again without seeing it, in part, through the lens of this collection. - Michael Chabon; ""An introduction to the art of being a grown-up person in a slightly foolish world.... This is the best thing I've read in years - tough and sad, frivolous and deep, and full of words like little sharp rocks in your shoes when you still have a long way to walk."" - Francois Camoin; ""Darrell Spencer's world is right outside the window, but it isn't, friends, any world you know. Like Grace Paley and Raymond Carver, Spencer fashions stories out of a language all his own - a lot like English, but stranger and more surprising."" - Bernard Cooper

About the Author:

Darrell Spencer, a professor of creative writing at Ohio University, grew up in Las Vegas. He is the author of three previous books of short stories, including Caution: Men in Trees, cowinner of the 1998 Flannery O'Connor Award.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0822942429
• ISBN 13: 9780822942429
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 192