Unlike nearly anyone with a byline in the supermarket circular, Tower forewent any means of self-promotion, including a homepage. Our hands were stiff and raw from the row over, and we paused at a well in the center of the village to wet our palms and have a drink. Gnut told her that if she would please let him know who it was, he’d consider it a favor if she’d let him intervene on her behalf. Can’t tell us anything about a hailstorm, or locusts and shit, or a bunch of damn dragons coming around and scaring the piss out of everybody’s wife.

Take Matthew, the narrator in “Retreat,” a thrice-married real-estate developer who has “lived and profited in nine American cities” and just recently bought a small mountain in Maine. The final story, the one which this book takes its title from, is the one most people will have heard about or already read, the one about the Vikings. I poked him and yelled at him, but the big man would not be roused, so I just tried to work up a little slack to where he wasn’t hurting my ribs, and I drifted back to sleep. i took some notes prior to wandering around Austin with the book, and they remind me of the chapter-opening pictures from Nabokov's Lectures on Literature, so i took a picture. Betrayal of the trust a man reposes in others is a biiig one ("The Brown Coast", "Wild America", "On the Show"), or the inability of humans to cope with change ("Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned", "Door in Your Eye", "Executors of Important Energies").

He wouldn’t look me in the face, stricken as he was by the awful fear that comes with getting hold of something you can’t afford to lose. The characters are invested in the scene, and bring a good measure of memory, abstraction, and analysis (though too many, perhaps, fail the kind of introspection you know Tower himself has, and this makes you wish he'd imbue his characters with more of their own). I'm not going to read the ones in between unless someone can convince me one of them is significantly better, or at least different.

In the title story of his debut collection, "Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned," Wells Tower uses contemporary American idiom to tell the story of a Viking having second thoughts about his career as a plunderer and pillager. As to why Tower had to wait so many years for his debut is anyone's guess, but one suspects we'll be hearing his name -- which invokes prose that is both soaring and deep -- for a long time to come.Sure, I could have told him thanks anyway, but once you back down from one job, you’re lucky if they’ll even let you put in for a flat-fee trade escort. his father would be a florid fifty-year-old who would suck the innocence and joy from his child as greedily as a desert wanderer savaging a found orange. But there's not much else about this book besides its style, which, as always, there's no accounting for taste. I’m trying my best not to pigeon-hole Tower here, because his writing is a bit more daring than I’m giving it credit for. I cared more for that girl than even she probably knew, and I was hoping to get in some thorough lovemaking before the Haycutting Month was under way and see if I couldn’t make us a little monkey.

These stories are mostly about men, sad men, sad and troubled men, in a way that isn't like anyone else's sad troubled men stories. Tower has a great deal of formal skill, he knows how to tell a story well, develop his characters, leaves much to the reader to divine, and blasts through the checklist that you’d find in any good creative writing class. I go wet at the eyes for my brother and swell with regret at the thirty-nine years we’ve spent lost to each other. Viking marauders descend on a much-plundered island, hoping some mayhem will shake off the winter blahs.

I woke up once in the middle of the night and found Gnut dead asleep, muttering and slobbering and holding me in a rough embrace. No se trata del estereotipo del beautiful loser, en el que la derrota es una renuncia voluntaria, una elección estética: los personajes de Wells Tower son vulgares y sórdidos; a veces generosos y otras egoístas, siempre obstinadamente humanos. Maksymalnego skoncentrowania historii, pokazania większej całości przez pryzmat chwili, stworzenia postaci z kilku dobrze dobranych scen. However, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned: Stories turned out to be a collection of utterly depressing stories about self-indulgent losers.