Knockemstiff - Tapa dura

Críticas

In Knockemstiff, Donald Ray Pollock give us the impossible - fast, funny stories about the saddest people you'll ever see in fiction ... More engaging than any new fiction in years (Chuck Palahniuk)

KNOCKEMSTIFF by Donald Ray Pollock is the best book I have ever read. This is the America they don't let you see on television. This is real literature. It will be read for centuries. (Michael Guinzburg)

It's as if you put David Lynch, Denis Johnson, and a drunk speed freak body builder into a blender. The result are some of the darkest, wildest, most messed up, hilarious stories I've ever read. Knockemstiff is really something (Willy Vlautin)

This electrifying collection of linked stories ... has the drive and impact of a fine novel. After every story in Knockemstiff I had to take a walk and let my head cool down. I keep reaching for some other writer to compare him with ... but Pollock is no shadow of anybody else. This is a powerful talent at work (Katherine Dunn, author of Geek Love)

I picked this up Sunday, intending to read a story or two before I went to the movies. Three hours later, I was reluctantly finishing the last story. I just couldn't put it down, because as sad, seedy and sordid as the lives and stories are, there was an honesty, commitment and balls-to-the-walls verve to the writing that was ultimately exhilarating ... This is the kind of short story collection that reminds people that love them why (Terry Goodman, Senior Book Buyer Amazon.com)

Reseña del editor

Knockemstiff is a pitch-dark and often hilarious collection of stories set in the tiny Appalachian town of Knockemstiff, Ohio, a community so deprived and diminished it no longer appears on any map.

The youth of Knockemstiff grow up in the malignant shadow of their parents; raised on abuse, alcohol, drugs and cigarettes, they are stunted in every possible way: emotionally, mentally, sometimes physically. They talk a lot about escape but they never so much as cross the county line.

The stories in Knockemstiff are simple and compact, blunt and brutal, but are also infused with a deep sympathy for the incapacitating loneliness of poverty, neglect and severely limited horizons.

Knockemstiff is a human, very funny and unforgettable debut from a stunning new voice in American fiction.