A Stone of the Heart: A Novel - Softcover

Grimes, Tom

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0870744186 ISBN 13: 9780870744181

Publisher: Southern Methodist Univ Pr, 1997

Synopsis

A moving, sometimes hilarious account of a family trying to hold itself together,A Stone of the Heart chronicles the dysfunction of a Queens, New York, Irish-Catholic family. Set in 1961, the book is narrated by the family's oldest son, fourteen-year-old Michaeloverweight and obsessed with baseball statisticswho is trying to come to grips with his parents' disastrous marriage, his younger brother's retreat into silence, and his grandparents' faltering efforts to help. In baseball Michael finds the orderliness and clarity lacking in his personal world; but when Roger Maris's sixty-first home run at the end of the season both does and doesn't break Babe Ruth's record, he comes to a tenuous understanding of life's shades of gray, enabling him to begin to forgive his alcoholic father and feckless mother.

About this title

About the Author

Tom Grimes is the author of the novels A Stone of the Heart, Season's End, City of God, Will@epicqwestcom, and Redemption Song, which was serialized in Narrative magazine. He edited The Workshop: Seven Decades from the Iowa Writers Workshop, the creative writing program from which he graduated. His forthcoming book, Mentor: A Memoir, traces his life as a writer and his friendship with Frank Conroy, author of the classic memoir Stop-Time and the novel Body & Soul. Grimes wrote Season's End while he was a student at the workshop, which Conroy directed. Abraham Verghese, author of the bestselling novel Cutting for Stone, writes that "Mentor: A Memoir is a must read for people who write and for every reader who has wondered about the mysterious alchemy that produces a writer." Tim O'Brien adds: "It's astonishing how much insight, passion, pain, joy, self-doubt, and sheer love Tom Grimes has managed to pack into this tightly made memoir of his relationship with the writer Frank Conroy. Not only does Mentor: A Memoir offer an honest and compelling account of the struggles of a writer at the outset of his career, but this immaculately composed memoir also draws an enduring and eerily lifelike portrait of Frank Conroy. For me, it was as if Conroy had somehow risen from the dead before my eyes, with all his impish zest and stern earnestness and voluble wisdom. Mentor: A Memoir is a beautiful, beautiful book -- a monument both to Frank Conroy and to the writer's terrifying quest for artistic excellence." Tom Grimes directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Texas State University.

Edition details

• Publisher: Southern Methodist Univ Pr
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0870744186
• ISBN 13: 9780870744181
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 131