New Releases by Tony Earley

A North Carolina teen experiences his first love as the US enters World War II in this emotional sequel to Jim the Boy . A New York Times Notable Book of the Year "Irresistible. . . . I galloped through this novel and relished every page." — New York Times Book Review Seven years ago, readers everywhere fell in love with Jim Glass, the precocious ten-year-old at the heart of Tony Earley''s bestseller Jim the Boy. Now a teenager, Jim returns in another tender and wise story of young love on the eve of World War Two. Jim Glass has fallen in love—as only a teenage boy can—with his classmate Chrissie Steppe. Unfortunately, Chrissie is Bucky Bucklaw''s girlfriend, and Bucky has joined the Navy on the eve of war. Jim vows to win Chrissie''s heart in his absence, but the war makes high school less than a safe haven, and gives a young man''s emotions a grown man''s gravity . . . With the uncanny insight into the well-intentioned heart that made Jim the Boy a favorite novel for thousands of readers, Tony Earley has fashioned another nuanced and unforgettable portrait of America in another time—making it again even realer than our own day. This is a timeless and moving story of discovery, loss and growing up, proving why Tony Earley''s writing "radiates with a largeness of heart" ( Esquire). "Tony Earley''s novels are the Shaker chairs of American literature." — Christian Science Monitor "Earley bewitches his readers with an idyll of boyhood so completely realized that we never want to leave it." — Newsweek "At the heart of The Blue Star is a good old-fashioned love story. . . . Earley writes with the same lyrical simplicity that he employed in Jim the Boy , calling to mind his literary idol Willa Cather." — Boston Globe "A very fine book, full of moments of humor and tenderness. . . . The Blue Star is, in more ways than one, wonderful reminder of how we used to live." — Minneapolis Star Tribune

In Mr.Tall, his first story collection in two decades, Tony Earley brings us seven rueful, bittersweet, riotous studies of characters both ordinary and mythical, seeking to make sense of the world transforming around them. He demonstrates once again the prodigious storytelling gifts that have made him one of the most accomplished writers of his generation. In the title story, a lonely young bride terrifyingly shares a remote mountain valley with a larger-than-life neighbor, while the grieving widow of "The Cryptozoologist" is sure she''s been visited by a Southern variant of Bigfoot. "Have You Seen the Stolen Girl?" introduces us to the ghost of Jesse James, who plagues an elderly woman in the wake of a neighborhood girl''s abduction. In "Haunted Castles of the Barrier Islands" a newly empty-nest couple stumbles through an impenetrable Outer Banks fog seeking a new life to replace the one they have lost, while "Yard Art" follows the estranged wife of a famous country singer as she searches for an undiscovered statue by an enigmatic artist. In the concluding novella, "Jack and the Mad Dog," we find Jack-the giant killer of the stories-in full flight from threats both canine and existential. Earley indelibly maps previously undiscovered territories of the human heart in these melancholy, comic, and occasionally strange stories. Along the way he leads us on a journey from contemporary Nashville to a fantastical land of talking dogs and flying trees, teaching us at every step that, even in the most familiar locales, the ordinary is never just that.

Analyse : Roman familial.

The author of Jim the Boy offers eleven essays about growing up in front of the television, fully ensconced in the imaginary world of Mayberry, Gilligan''s Island, and the Brady Bunch.

Both delightful and wise, Jim the Boy brilliantly captures the pleasures and fears of youth at a time when America itself was young and struggling to come into its own.

A collection of powerful short stories set in North Carolina includes "Charlotte," about a professional wrestling extravaganza that uncovers a young couple''s differences, and "Gettysburg," in which a middle-aged man falls in love--with his wife.