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Summary and Reviews of Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned

Stories

by Wells Tower
  • BookBrowse Review:
  • Critics' Consensus (8):
  • First Published:
  • Mar 17, 2009, 256 pages
  • Paperback:
  • Feb 2010, 256 pages
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About This Book

Book Summary

In the stories of Wells Tower, families fall apart and messily try to reassemble themselves. His version of America is touched with the seamy splendor of the dropout, the misfit: failed inventors, boozy dreamers, hapless fathers, wayward sons.

Viking marauders descend on a much-plundered island, hoping some mayhem will shake off the winter blahs. A man is booted out of his home after his wife discovers that the print of a bare foot on the inside of his windshield doesn’t match her own. Teenage cousins, drugged by summer, meet with a reckoning in the woods. A boy runs off to the carnival after his stepfather bites him in a brawl.

In the stories of Wells Tower, families fall apart and messily try to reassemble themselves. His version of America is touched with the seamy splendor of the dropout, the misfit: failed inventors, boozy dreamers, hapless fathers, wayward sons. Combining electric prose with savage wit, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned is a major debut, announcing a voice we have not heard before.

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Reviews

BookBrowse Review

BookBrowse

Although Tower writes with the specificity and razor-sharp observations of a poet, his metaphors go down easy, coated in the sugar of a writer at ease with his craft... Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned makes me hunger for Tower's first novel...continued

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(Reviewed by Lucia Silva).

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Beyond the Book



About the Author
Wells Tower’s short stories and journalism have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, McSweeney's, The Paris Review, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, The Washington Post Magazine, and elsewhere. He received two Pushcart Prizes and the Plimpton Prize from The Paris Review.

According to The New York Observer, "Brown Coast", the opening story of Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned is the first short story Wells Tower wrote during his first year in the Columbia fiction program, which he joined in the fall of 2000.  It was published in the spring 2002 issue of The Paris Review after someone there discovered it in the slush pile.  "Down Through the Valley," another story from ...

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Read-Alikes

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