Tongues of Angels - Hardcover

Price, Reynolds

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0689120931 ISBN 13: 9780689120930

Publisher: Scribner, 1990

Synopsis

"I'm as peaceful a man as you're likely to meet in America now, but this is about a death I may have caused. Not slowly over time by abuse or meanness but on a certain day and by ignorance, by plain lack of notice. Though it happened thirty-four years ago, and though I can't say it's haunted my mind that many nights lately, I suspect I can draw it out for you now, clear as this noon. I may need to try...." A summer camp in the Blue Ridge mountains, the deceptively tranquil 1950s, a classic semicomic cast and setting (teachers, swarms of rowdy boys, crafts, Indian lore, campfires), the twenty-one-year-old painting teacher and one superbly gifted boy, haunted by a tragic past yet calmly heroic. All advance through splendid weather, natural grandeur and riotous fun toward a startling fate that none will forget. In his eighth novel, Reynolds Price provides again the kind of voice that won his readers in Kate Vaiden, winner of the 1986 National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. A sane adult looks back at his life, finds and gives us the interesting facts, the meanings he thought he learned for good on the threshold of manhood and how they look now, in full maturity. The Tongues of Angels is intimate, enveloping, relentless and rich. Any veteran of summer camp, boys' or girls', will hear deep echoes, recalling the buried forecasts of youth. Any reader stands to gain throughout.

About this title

From the Inside Flap

er has never forgotten the drama that unfolded at a summer camp in the Smoky Mountains in 1954. He was twenty-one then, art counselor at Camp Juniper, an environment lush with nature and buzzing with rowdy boys on the brink of manhood. Into their midst came a gifted boy tied to a terrible past and an equally mysterious future -- a future that would leave Bridge forever changed . . .

About the Author

Reynolds Price was born in Macon, North Carolina in 1933. He was reared and educated in his native state, taking his A.B. from Duke University. In 1955 he traveled to Merton College, Oxford where he studied for three years as a Rhodes Scholar. He then returned to Duke and began the teaching which he continues as James B. Duke Professor of English.

In 1962 his first novel A Long and Happy Life appeared. It received the William Faulkner Award and has never been out of print. In ensuing years he has published seven more novels. In 1986 his Kate Vaiden received the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has also published volumes of short stories, poems, plays, essays, translations and a memoir, Clear Pictures. His television play Private Contentment was commissioned by American Playhouse for its first season, and in 1989 his trilogy of plays New Music premiered at the Cleveland Play House.

He is a member of the National Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. His books have appeared in sixteen languages.

Edition details

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 1990
• ISBN 10: 0689120931
• ISBN 13: 9780689120930
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208