So Long, See You Tomorrow - Hardcover

MAXWELL, William

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0816130930 ISBN 13: 9780816130931

Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980

Synopsis

In this magically evocative novel, William Maxwell explores the enigmatic gravity of the past, which compels us to keep explaining it even as it makes liars out of us every time we try. On a winter morning in the 1920s, a shot rings out on a farm in rural Illinois. A man named Lloyd Wilson has been killed. And the tenuous friendship between two lonely teenagers—one privileged yet neglected, the other a troubled farm boy—has been shattered.Fifty years later, one of those boys—now a grown man—tries to reconstruct the events that led up to the murder. In doing so, he is inevitably drawn back to his lost friend Cletus, who has the misfortune of being the son of Wilson's killer and who in the months before witnessed things that Maxwell's narrator can only guess at. Out of memory and imagination, the surmises of children and the destructive passions of their parents, Maxwell creates a luminous American classic of youth and loss.

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

On an Illinois farm in the 1920s, a man is murdered, and in the same moment the tenous friendship between two lonely boys comes to an end. In telling their interconnected stories, American Book Award winner William delivers a masterfully restrained and magically evocative meditation on the past. "A small, perfect novel."--Washington Post Book World.

About the Author:

William Maxwell was born in Illinois in 1908. He was the author of a distinguished body of work: six novels, three short story collections, an autobiographical memoir and a collection of literary essays and reviews. A New Yorker editor for forty years, he helped to shape the prose and careers of John Updike, John Cheever, John O'Hara and Eudora Welty. So Long, See You Tomorrow won the American Book Award, and he received the PEN/Malamud Award. He died in New York in 2000. Ann Patchett is the author of several novels including The Patron Saint of Liars, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, Taft, which won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, The Magician's Assistant, for which she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, and Bel Canto, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Orange Prize, the Booksense Book of the Year Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her non-fiction book, Truth & Beauty, was a New York Times Bestseller and the winner of a Books for a Better Life Award. Ann was the editor for Best American Short Stories 2006. Her work has been translated into over thirty languages. Ann has written for many publications, including Harper's, Gourmet, The New York Times Magazine, Vogue, and The Washington Post. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

About this edition

• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
• Publication date: 1980
• ISBN 10: 0816130930
• ISBN 13: 9780816130931
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 135