Tony Earley Knihy

Es sind die siebziger und achtziger Jahre. Die Kleinstadt, in der der Erzähler aufwuchs, ist ländlich, niemand schließt die Türen ab, man lebt für sich, hat einen kritischen Blick auf die Nachbarn. Wir waren arm, erzählt Earley, das merkte ich daran, daß unser Fernseher schwarz-weiß war. Vor diesem flimmernden Kasten mit Knöpfen so groß wie Baseballbälle und so schwer, daß nicht einmal Hoss von Bonanza ihn hätte heben können, sitzt die Familie und sieht sich die Serien an: Bonanza, später Charlie's Angels, Star Trek, Dynasty, Dallas. Für Earley ist das die große Welt draußen. In trügerisch einfacher Prosa erzählt Tony Earley von den großen Dingen des Lebens, von Gott, Liebe, Tod, Familie. Er erzählt davon, wie schwer es ist, seinen Platz in der Welt zu finden, ohne zu verleugnen, woher man kommt, ohne seine Authentizität zu verlieren.

Die Reise zu seinem Grossvater, den ein dunkles Geheimnis umgibt, wird für den Jungen Jim, der in den 1930er-Jahren auf einer Farm in den Südstaaten ohne Vater aufwächst, zu etwas ganz Besonderem.

The much-praised stories that make up Here We Are in Paradise create entire worlds and indelible moments as only the best short fiction can do. The characters here are people caught in extremis, at points in their lives when their knowledge of their own heart is forced to change or grow, when they begin to understand another person truly, when the forces and places that have shaped them become clear to them at last. The lovely "My Father's Heart" (named a Distinguished Story of 1992 in The Best American Short Stories) and "Aliceville" (selected by National Public Radio's "Sound of Writing" as one of the best stories of '92) explore a young man's awakening to a rural world taut with unspoken emotion. "Charlotte," selected for The Best American Short Stories 1993 and New Stories from the South: The Year's Best 1993, is a muscular, funny story about the insecurities of early adulthood, revealed through the windows of romance and professional wrestling. The magisterial title story and "The Prophet from Jupiter" both look inside hearts full to bursting with loss and fury and lessons learned too late. All these stories are set in North Carolina and exude a powerful sense of place, a place that breathes through every vivid, unforgettable character. It is rare that a first book of fiction displays such extraordinary gifts of understanding and craft. Tony Earley's stories will take up lodging in your memory and stay with you forever.

This is the book that in hardcover won unanimous praise from reviewers, who called it "beautiful and transcendent" (The Boston Globe), a book that "measures the arc of a culture's mortality in small, personal increments" (Star Tribune, Minneapolis), is written "in a poker-faced style that always seems on the verge of exploding into manic laughter or howls of pain" (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution). They're right. Tony Earley is a writer so good at his craft that you don't read his words so much as inhale them. His first book of nonfiction is one of those unexpected classics, like Ann Lamott's Traveling Mercies, in which a great writer rips open his/her heart and takes the reader inside for a no-holds-barred tour.In a prose style that is deceptively simple, Earley confronts the big things-God, death, civilization, family, his own clinical depression-with wit and grace, without looking away or smirking.