The Lost Get-Back Boogie: A Novel - Hardcover

Burke, James Lee

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 080713032X ISBN 13: 9780807130322

Publisher: LSU Press, 2004

Synopsis

Before The Lost Get-Back Boogie appeared to wide acclaim in 1986, James Lee Burke had been out of print in cloth for thirteen years and his fifth novel had received a record 111 rejection letters. "LSU Press put me back in the game and turned my career around," Burke says. The novels and stories Burke had written during those years of rejection eventually became the stuff of the Dave Robicheaux series, which has earned him two Edgar Awards.Reviews of The Lost Get-Back Boogie now seem prescient. "This is the book that Burke was born to write―and you're grateful he did," wrote syndicated reviewer Nancy Pate. "It's the sort of novel that could win Burke a wider readership," said the Wichita Eagle-Beacon. And from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, "The Lost Get-Back Boogie was my introduction to Burke, and it is a cherished one. Burke demonstrates a rare ability to write an extraordinarily propulsive tale that borders on genre fiction without ever being less than literature."
The novel's title is also the name of the song that Iry Paret―a honky-tonk musician, Korean vet, and ex-con―wants to write to hold his memories of a "more uncomplicated time," before the war, before prison. The book opens the day thirty-year-old Iry leaves Louisiana's Angola state penitentiary, after serving two years for manslaughter, and follows him to Montana, where he hopes to stay cool and out of trouble by working hard on a ranch owned by the father of his prison pal, Buddy Riordan. Iry finds the fresh start he seeks, joins a weekend band, and even falls in love. But the Riordan family's problems deal Iry a new sort of trouble with some ultimately tragic consequences.
The Lost Get-Back Boogie is a novel about loyalty and friendship, betrayal and loss. It is about essentially good people and their attempts to define the value of their lives and to find their place in a changing, complicated world. And it is the work of James Lee Burke at the top of his form.

About this title

About the Author:

James Lee Burke is the author of twenty-three novels and one collection of short stories. Two books, Heaven's Prisoners and Two for Texas, were adapted as motion pictures. Over the years, he has also worked as a pipeliner, land surveyor, social worker, newspaper reporter, and creative writing teacher. A native of Houston, he grew up on the Louisiana-Texas coast and now divides his time between New Iberia, Louisiana, and Missoula, Montana. Christine Wiltz is the author of three mysteries featuring the Irish Channel detective Neal Rafferty, the novel Glass House, and the nonfiction work The Last Madam: A Life in the New Orleans Underworld. She lives in New Orleans.
Christine Wiltz , a native resident of New Orleans, is also the author of The Last Madam: A Life in the New Orleans Underworld and three mystery novels featuring Irish Channel detective Neal Rafferty. She coauthored a television documentary about David Duke, Backlash: Race and the American Dream, which aired on PBS.

From Publishers Weekly:

This wonderful novel about a Korean War veteran released in the '60s from a Louisiana prison farm where he served a term for manslaughter is neither roman tic nor cynical in its realism. Loner Iry Paret, a country-and-western musician, has survived two years of hacks, trustees and dangerous inmates, not with hope but with a dull, gloomy attentiveness that has written hardship's effects all over him. Once he is paroled, he drinks liquor as if it were a tonic, but even drinking brings no joy. He travels to a fellow prisoner's ranch, and as he heads west, the air clears. His involvement with his acid-dropping pal Buddy Rior dan, Buddy's stoical ex-cowboy father (who feuds with a foul-odored pulpmill) and Buddy's estranged wife, Beth, tugs him between adjustment to straight life and the battles that may send him back to jail. Although the ending strays, this latest novel by the author of The Convict is pensive and cautiously paced. It also contrasts two very different parts of the essence of Americathe hazy bayou and a resolute valley in the beautiful West.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 080713032X
• ISBN 13: 9780807130322
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 264