Don't Skip Out on Me - Tapa dura

Críticas

"The straightforward beauty of Vlautin's writing, and the tender care he shows his characters, turns a story of struggle into indispensable reading. I couldn't recommend it more highly."--Ann Patchett

"Vlautin is a writer with incredible heart, and The Free is his best achievement yet, a profound look at characters living on the margins, honest people who have been hit hard by the dark realities of a difficult world."--Los Angeles Review of Books

"Few contemporary western writers tell the truth with the unerring eye of Willy Vlautin, a literary realist whose emotionally charged characters achieve that rarest of goals in fiction--to tell a great story..."--Craig Johnson, author of the Walt Longmire Mysteries

"Willy Vlautin is one of the bravest novelists writing... An unsentimental Steinbeck, a heartbroken Haruf, Willy Vlautin tells us who really lives now in our America, our city in ruins."--Ursula K. Le Guin

"With straightforward economy, he draws us into [the characters'] seemingly intractable problems, revealing their persistence and decency... Vlautin's unadorned narrative is affecting; these unassuming characters bore into us in surprising ways."--New York Times Book Review on The Free

"A debut road-trip novel that echoes the spare, bleak style of such writers as Denis Johnson and Raymond Carver...[Vlautin] conveys the pain and desolate lives of his characters without a hint of melodrama"--Washington Post (on The Motel Life)

"Northline shines with naked honesty and unsentimental humanity. The character of Allison Johnson, and the wounded-but-still-walking people she encounters on her journey, will stay with me for a long while. Vlautin has written the American novel that I've been hoping to find."--George Pelecanos

"I love Willy Vlautin's novels. Downbeat and plaintive as they are, the tenderness holds on like the everlasting arms.... Willy's voice is pure and his stories universal. He never loses hope or heart and I believe every word he's written."--Barry Gifford

"Lean on Pete riveted me. Reading it, I was heartbroken and moved; enthralled and convinced. This is serious American literature."--Cheryl Strayed, The Oregonian

"Willy's novel Lean on Pete was one of my favorite reads of the last decade. I might love The Free even more. 'Cinematic minimalism' in the grand tradition of Fat City, Ironweed, and the works of the great Raymond Carver.--Patterson Hood, songwriter and musician, Drive-By Truckers

Reseña del editor

A FINALIST FOR THE PEN/FAULKNER AWARD

From Willy Vlautin,  award-winning author of Lean on Pete and The Motel Life, comes a powerful exploration of identity and loneliness pulled from deep within America's soul.

Don’t Skip Out On Me is going to make your heart crumple into a little wad of paper and then open it back up into a perfect paper airplane sailing the skies from the hand of a boy. How does a bi-cultural man find a self when he’s been abandoned by his parents? He invents it, that’s how, with his hands, his fists, and that fist-shaped muscle, a heart. No one anywhere writes as beautifully about people whose stories stay close to the dirt. Willy Vlautin is a secular—and thus real and profoundly useful—saint.”
—Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Book of Joan

Horace Hopper has spent most of his life on a Nevada sheep ranch, but dreams of something bigger. Mr. and Mrs. Reese, the aging ranchers, took him in and treated him like a son, intending to leave the ranch in his hands. But Horace, ashamed not only of his half-Paiute, half-Irish heritage, but also of the fact his parents did not want him, feels as if he doesn’t belong on the ranch, or anywhere. Knowing he needs to make a name for himself, he decides to leave the only loving home he’s known to prove his worth as a championship boxer.

Mr. Reese is holding on to a way of life that is no longer sustainable. He’s a seventy-two-year-old rancher with a bad back. He’s not sure how he’ll keep things going without Horace but he knows the boy must find his own way.

To become a champion Horace must change not just the way he eats, trains, and thinks, but who he is. Reinventing himself as Hector Hildago, a scrappy Mexican boxer, he heads to Tucson and begins training and entering fights. His journey brings him to boxing rings across the Southwest and Mexico and finally, to the streets of Las Vegas, where Horace learns he can’t change who he is or outrun his destiny.

A beautiful, wrenching portrait of a downtrodden man, Don’t Skip Out on Me narrates the struggle to find one's place in a vast and lonely world with profound tenderness, and will make you consider those around you—and yourself—differently.