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by Doug Dorst
With the publication of his debut novel, Alive in Necropolis, Doug Dorst was widely celebrated as one of the most creative, original literary voices of his generation - an heir to T.C. Boyle and Denis Johnson, a northern California Haruki Murakami. Now, in his second book, The Surf Guru, his full talent is on display, revealing an ability to explore worlds and capture characters that other writers have not yet discovered.
In the title story, an old surfing-champion turned surfwear-entrepreneur sits on his ocean-front balcony watching a new generation of surfers come of age on the waves, all but one of whom wear wet suits emblazoned with the Surf Guru's name. An acid-tongued, pioneering botanist who has been exiled from the academy composes a series of scurrilous (and hilarious) biographical sketches of his colleagues and rivals, inadvertently telling his own story. A pair of twenty-first-century drifters course through a series of unusual adventures in their dilapidated car, chased west out of one town and into the next, dreaming of hitting the Pacific.
Dorst's characters have all successfully cultivated a particular expertise, and yet they remain intent on moving toward the horizon, seeking hope in something new. Likewise, each of Dorst's stories is a virtuoso performance balancing humor and insight, achieving a perfect pitch, pulsing with a gritty and punchy, distinctly American realism - and yet always pushing on into the unexpected, taking us some place new.
"Whether it's the campaign adviser shackled to a loser in "The Candidate in Bloom" or the hapless dreamers in "Vikings" and "What Is Mine Will Know My Face," the humanity in Dorst's characters can break a reader's heart." - Publishers Weekly
"The Surf Guru is one of the best collections I've read in years. Formally innovative, full of humor and terror and compassion in equal measure, and spanning an astonishing range of settings and characters, these stories renewed my faith in the short story as an art form. Dorst's work is utterly unique and visionary." - Dan Chaon, author of Among the Missing and Await Your Reply
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"The stories in The Surf Guru are unusual not just for the frequent genius of their conceits, but for the tremendous sympathy they demonstrate toward characters who struggle with love, loneliness, and disappointment. Doug Dorst writes with a big, unbridled imagination and a big, commiserating heart, and the results, by turns devastating and hilarious, are always deeply moving."- Chris Adrian, author of The Children's Hospital and A Better Angel
"Starred Review." - Kirkus
This information about The Surf Guru was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Doug Dorst is the author of Alive in Necropolis, runner- up for the 2008 PEN/Hemingway Award, winner of the Emperor Norton Award, and San Francisco's 2009 One City One Book selection. Winner of a 2008 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts, Dorst is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford. His work has appeared in McSweeney's, Ploughshares, Epoch, and other journals, as well as in the anthology Politically Inspired. He is also a former Jeopardy champion. A longtime resident of San Francisco, Dorst now lives in Austin, Texas, where he teaches creative writing at St. Edward's University.
Pony Confidential
by Christina Lynch
In this whimsical mystery, a grumpy pony must clear his beloved human's name from a murder accusation.
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The low brow and the high brow
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