Running: Difficulty at the Beginning Boo

A Globe and Mail Top 100 Pick of 2006

In this, the first volume of Difficulty at the Beginning, John Dupre is a student at Raysburg Military Academy, where his best friend Lyle Ledzinski is training him to be a perfect Socratic athlete: A sound mind in a sound body.Together they want to experience all of life - athletics, philosophy, beer, the quest for Truth, and most of all, those mysterious creatures that seem to come from another planet: girls. By their junior year they've taken to hitch-hiking around, fired up on Kerouac, James Dean and St. Augustine, and their horizons begin to expand like an endless sunrise. They're out forexperience and suffering, and that's just what they're going to get. Written as though on the back of the pages ofGloria (shortlisted for the Governor General's Award, 1999), Running depicts the lives of young men in late-1950s America with humour, pathos, and muscle. Taken on its own or as the prelude to Difficulty at the Beginning, it's a memorable and invigorating piece of writing that shows how the smug, grey culture of the 1950s was shattered forever with three little words.

Keith Maillard is the author of thirteen novels, including Two Strand River, Alex Driving South, Motet, Hazard Zones, Gloria, The Clarinet Polka, and Difficulty at the Beginning, his four-volume Bildungsroman. He has won the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize (Motet) and was shortlisted for both the Commonwealth Literary Prize (Hazard Zones) and the Governor General's Literary Awards (Gloria). The Clarinet Polka was awarded the Creative Arts Prize by the Polish American Historical Association. His poetry collection, Dementia Americana, won the Gerald Lampert Award in 1995 for the Best First Book of Poetry Published in Canada.

Keith was born and raised in Wheeling, West Virginia, the inspiration for the fictional town of Raysburg, which serves as the setting for many of his novels. He has been a musician, a contributor for CBC Radio, a freelance photographer and journalist, and a designer of distance education courses. His reviews, essays, and poems have appeared in many journals, ranging from Event to Flare. He is currently chair of the creative writing program at the University of British Columbia. He lives in West Vancouver with his wife and two daughters.

The Globe and Mail called Difficulty at the Beginning a work of terrible beauty and grace, a masterpiece fit to contend with the best novels of the last century. Be sure to check out all four volumes Running, Morgantown, Lyndon Johnson and the Majorettes, and Looking Good now available as e-books!

Please visit Keith online at keithmaillard.com.