We the Animals - Hardcover

Justin Torres

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1847083951 ISBN 13: 9781847083951

Publisher: Granta, 2012

Synopsis

Three brothers tear their way through childhood-smashing tomatoes all over each other, building kites from rubbish, hiding when their parents do battle, tiptoeing around the house as their mother sleeps off her graveyard shift. Paps and Ma are from Brooklyn-he's Puerto Rican, she's white-barely out of childhood themselves, and their love is a serious, dangerous thing. Life in this family is fierce and absorbing, full of chaos and heartbreak and the euphoria of belonging completely to one another. From the intense familial unity felt by a child to the profound alienation he endures as he begins to forge his own way in the world, this beautiful novel reinvents the coming-of-age story in a way that is sly and incredibly powerful.

About this title

Review

Amazon Best Books of the Month, September 2011: We The Animals, Justin Torres's sparse debut novel, is brimming with delicate stories of family, of growing up, of facing reality, and of delaying it. Narrated by the youngest son of a Puerto Rican father and white mother from Brooklyn raising their three young sons in upstate New York, the novel is comprised of vignettes detailing moments spent in the eye of the ferocious bubble of home. Torres paints a large picture through diminutive strokes, evoking envy for the couple’s passion and fear for just how easily that passion turns to rage. The brothers wrestle, fight, cry, and laugh as their family is torn and repaired over and over again. Torres’s prose is fierce, grabbing hold of the reader and allowing him inside the wrenching, whirlwind of a life lived intensely. --Alexandra Foster

From the Back Cover

In this groundbreaking debut, Justin Torres plunges us into the chaotic heart of one family, the intense bonds of three brothers, and the mythic effects of this fierce love on the people we must become.
"We the Animals is a dark jewel of a book. It s heartbreaking. It s beautiful. It resembles no other book I ve read. Michael Cunningham
"A miracle in concentrated pages, you are going to read it again and again." Dorothy Allison
"Rumbles with lyric dynamite . . . Torres is a savage new talent." Benjamin Percy, Esquire
"A fiery ode to boyhood . . . A welterweight champ of a book." NPR, Weekend Edition
"A tremendously gifted writer whose highly personal voice should excite us in much the same way that Raymond Carver s or Jeffrey Eugenides s voice did when we first heard it." Washington Post
"A novel so honest, poetic, and tough that it makes you reexamine what it means to love and to hurt." O, The Oprah Magazine
"The communal howl of three young brothers sustains this sprint of a novel . . . A kind of incantation." The New Yorker
JUSTIN TORRES is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop and a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford. Among many other things, he has worked as a farmhand, a dog walker, a creative writing teacher, and a bookseller.
Author photograph (c) Gregory Crowley
Look for the Reader s Guide at www.marinerbooks.com
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Edition details

• Publisher: Granta
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1847083951
• ISBN 13: 9781847083951
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 128