It Will End with Us
Will be published approx. on 27. November 2014
Book
Paperback/Softback
150 pages
978-1-56689-372-5 (ISBN)
Description
Newsweek's Favorite Books of 2014 Praise for Sam Savage: Winner of the O. Henry Prize for "Cigarettes" "Sam Savage manages to be both artful and literal-minded in this faux autobiographical tale of childhood and a mother afflicted and finally driven mad by her wish for artistic success. Savage writes knowingly about the uncertainties of childhood memory, but creates a convincing world of sibling combat and adult pretension. A wonderful, absorbing novel."--C. Michael Curtis, Fiction Editor, The Atlantic Monthly "If the world--all its hysteric noise--was muted for just one minute, Sam Savage is what you might be fortunate enough to hear. His elegant laconism, his leaps across the self-evident, his soft aplomb, and the rarified air he bestows upon the mundane make him the only American writer worthy of the label the true eccentric."--Valeria Luiselli It Will End With Us is Sam Savage's latest deep dive into the mind and voice of a character, and his most personal work yet. Brick by textual brick, his narrator, Eve, builds a memorial to the mother who raised her, emotionally abandoned her, and shaped her in her own image.
Eve's memories summon a childhood in rural South Carolina, a decaying house on impoverished soil, and an insular society succumbing to the influences of a wider world. It Will End With Us is a portrait of a place full of hummingbirds and wild irises, but also of frustration and grief. It is the story of a family tragedy, provoked by a mother's stifled ambitions, and seized by the wide-open gaze of a child. Rarely has a novel so brief taken on so much, so powerfully. Sam Savage is the best-selling author of Firmin: Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife, The Cry of the Sloth, Glass, and The Way of the Dog, all from Coffee House Press. A finalist for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award, Savage holds a PhD in philosophy from Yale University and resides in Madison, Wisconsin.
Eve's memories summon a childhood in rural South Carolina, a decaying house on impoverished soil, and an insular society succumbing to the influences of a wider world. It Will End With Us is a portrait of a place full of hummingbirds and wild irises, but also of frustration and grief. It is the story of a family tragedy, provoked by a mother's stifled ambitions, and seized by the wide-open gaze of a child. Rarely has a novel so brief taken on so much, so powerfully. Sam Savage is the best-selling author of Firmin: Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife, The Cry of the Sloth, Glass, and The Way of the Dog, all from Coffee House Press. A finalist for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award, Savage holds a PhD in philosophy from Yale University and resides in Madison, Wisconsin.
Reviews / Votes
Newsweek's Favorite Books of 2014 Included in Library Journal's "25 Key Indie Fiction Titles, Fall 2014-Winter 2015" "A Southern childhood in duskier, Tennessee Williams times, offering an aphoristic scattering of memories--one- and two-sentence stand-alones that spill isolated down the page like little gems... showing us how memory works and how we make sense of our lives, drip by drip and sensation by sensation."--Library Journal "Savage's lean, meditative novels, so meticulously pitched and poised, eschew the bloated excess and garish dazzle that can mar those from writers half his age... In Savage's novel, or Eve's "inventory of tiny things," it is the small, fleeting and quiet details that speak volumes."--Star Tribune "Sam Savage, once more, elicits our admiration and aesthetic appreciation for reminding us not to be complacent, and to interrogate what Eve terms the 'inner reaches'--our inner selves--and what we believe, in a compact with others, to be the real world."--Numero Cinq "A small book that tells a huge story about a Southern woman's memories of her mother and a vanishing world."--Shelf Awareness "As Savage indicates with philosophical acumen ... the private symbol is a myth."--Prairie Schooner "The narrative perfectly replicates the capriciousness of memory."--AskMen.com "A novel written in a most unusual way: a series of brief paragraphs which sometimes read like diary entries, other times like descriptions from a book of recollections. The mosaic effect is enhanced by the author's skillful use of language, his vivid, poetically-charged prose style."--Lively Arts "Savage's stylistic movements around structure and prose helps texture this narrative and make the emotional vulnerability of Eve even more resonating... It Will End with Us is a beautiful portrait of a woman who attempts to recreate what she has left by meditating on images."--Online Sundries "Reading the novel can feel like admiring dewdrops on a spider's web, each paragraph and sentence glittering exquisitely ... Savage's is a book of the heart as much as the head. Which is itself an accomplishment of no small note: to recognize the arbitrary, degraded thing that is memory, and allow it its loveliness for all of that."--New York Times Review of Books "There's a vividness to these false memories; even those scraps battered 'beyond recognition' shine with a light of their own."--Wisconsin State Journal "To call the book a novel, however, fails to acknowledge the poetry in its form." --Carolina QuarterlyMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
MN
United States
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Illustrations
Illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 189 mm
Width: 118 mm
Thickness: 20 mm
Weight
152 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-56689-372-5 (9781566893725)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Person
Sam Savage is the best-selling author of Firmin: Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife, The Cry of the Sloth, Glass, and The Way of the Dog, all from Coffee House Press. A finalist for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award, Savage holds a PhD in philosophy from Yale University and resides in Madison, Wisconsin.