Eighty Days of Sunlight - Softcover

Yune, Robert

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1632260441 ISBN 13: 9781632260444

Publisher: Prospecta Press, 2015

Synopsis

After suffering a childhood "accident" involving a campfire and a bullet, Jason Han spends his childhood being cared for by a doctor in Princeton, New Jersey while the rest of his family lives in a factory town near Scranton, Pennsylvania. Years later, as they prepare for college, Jason and his older brother, Tommy, reluctantly work together to investigate their father's suicide.

Ultimately, the investigation concludes violently, and the brothers move to Pittsburgh where they attempt to cohabitate peacefully while working to settle their father's complicated estate. Together, they explore the city once described as "hell with the lid off," full of post-industrial landscapes and sultry coeds. The brothers also travel landscapes of guilt, betrayal, and secrets as they try to figure out what destroyed their family--and how to save what's left of it.

Eighty Days of Sunlight is Yune's debut novel, a poignant coming-of-age tale that brilliantly tackles the prickly relationship between two brothers, exploring themes of trust, identity, and loss.

About this title

About the Author

Robert Yune was born in Seoul, South Korea. As a Navy brat, he traveled around the world, moving 11 times by the time he turned 18.

Yune has published fiction in The Kenyon Review, The Los Angeles Review, and Avery, among others. In 2008, he received a fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. In 2012, he was a finalist for the Flannery O’Connor Award in Short Fiction and was one of five finalists for the Prairie Schooner Book Prize, selected by Sherman Alexie and Colin Channer.

From 2010-2013, Yune served as fiction editor of The Fourth River. He has worked as a behavioral health researcher, a census enumerator, and a stand-in for George Takei. He currently lives and teaches in Pittsburgh.

Review

"moving and darkly comic....Equal parts hilarity and heartbreak in an accomplished debut." --Kirkus Reviews

"EIGHTY DAYS OF SUNLIGHT reads with the compelling immediacy of a memoir that is by turns tender and terrifying.  But the true brilliance of Robert Yune's writing lies in his superb control over both his sensibility and his craft which bend neither to sentimentality nor easy bitterness.Quite simply, I love and admire this wonderful novel mightily, and boldly predict that it introduces us to a young writer who is on the threshold of becoming an important voice in American literature." - Chuck Kinder, author of the New York Times-Notable novel HONEYMOONERS  and LAST MOUNTAIN DANCER.

"Robert Yune is a writer to watch out for. No, Robert Yune is a writer to find right now. Robert Yune is unafraid of leaving blood and blood's endless questions on the page. This is a book about brothers, about family, about adoption, about inheritance, about home. This is a book about books. This is a book about this world we live in. This is a book about you."
 -- Matthew Salesses, author of The Hundred-Year Flood and Different Racisms

About this edition

• Publisher: Prospecta Press
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1632260441
• ISBN 13: 9781632260444
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288