Tender As Hellfire
Published on 1. August 2018
220 pages
978-1-61775-008-3 (ISBN)
Description
From the award-winning author of
The Boy Detective Fails: A novel of two brothers growing up on the other side of the tracks.
"A trailer park in the Plains town of Tenderloin is the setting of this crusty coming-of-age debut, which features some of the liveliest characters just this side of believable that one is apt to meet in a contemporary novel. The first-person narrator is a moral but susceptible eleven-year-old called Dough, who lusts after his fifth-grade teacher and idolizes his trouble-making older brother, Pill-Bug. The boys, who are new to the town and shamed by the stigma of living in a trailer, were named by a father who wanted them to remain tough and who ended up dying while smuggling cigarettes along a Texas highway. Their mother and her new boyfriend, French, are low-life swingers, allowing the siblings to spend nights with Val, who entertains a slew of men but whom Dough worships as a virginal Madonna. Dough's own adoring friend is Lottie, a slightly deranged girl who offers Dough a gift of one of her taxidermist father's specimens; meanwhile, Pill-Bug earns a special affection from Lunna, a high school floozy. Each character is vividly described... Meno's passionate new voice makes him a writer to watch." - Publishers Weekly
"A trailer park in the Plains town of Tenderloin is the setting of this crusty coming-of-age debut, which features some of the liveliest characters just this side of believable that one is apt to meet in a contemporary novel. The first-person narrator is a moral but susceptible eleven-year-old called Dough, who lusts after his fifth-grade teacher and idolizes his trouble-making older brother, Pill-Bug. The boys, who are new to the town and shamed by the stigma of living in a trailer, were named by a father who wanted them to remain tough and who ended up dying while smuggling cigarettes along a Texas highway. Their mother and her new boyfriend, French, are low-life swingers, allowing the siblings to spend nights with Val, who entertains a slew of men but whom Dough worships as a virginal Madonna. Dough's own adoring friend is Lottie, a slightly deranged girl who offers Dough a gift of one of her taxidermist father's specimens; meanwhile, Pill-Bug earns a special affection from Lunna, a high school floozy. Each character is vividly described... Meno's passionate new voice makes him a writer to watch." - Publishers Weekly
More details
Other editions
Additional editions
Person
Joe Meno is a fiction writer and playwright who lives in Chicago. He is a winner of the Nelson Algren Literary Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Great Lakes Book Award, and was a finalist for the Story Prize. He is the author of five novels and two short story collections including
The Great Perhaps,
The Boy Detective Fails,
Demons in the Spring, and
Hairstyles of the Damned. His short fiction has been published in
One Story,
McSweeney's,
Swink,
LIT,
TriQuarterly,
Other Voices,
Gulf Coast, and broadcast on
NPR. His nonfiction has appeared in the
New York Timesand
Chicago magazine. His stage plays have been produced in Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington, DC, and Charville, France. He is an associate professor in the fiction writing department at Columbia College Chicago.
Content
- Intro
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Table of Contents
- acknowledgments
- tenderloin
- kiss of soft gravel
- the sounds of midnight
- dark eye of a dog
- the devil in his place
- the birthday surprise
- the dollar-eighty-nine story
- the king of the tango
- the devil lives in texas
- the star of silver is just plain lousy
- the glass eye
- hell's fire has arrived
