| Search | About | Preferences | Interact | Help | |
| 150 million books. 1 search engine. | ||
Tony Earley
new books, used books, rare books by Tony Earley
› Find all books by 'Tony Earley' and compare prices› Find signed collectible books by 'Tony Earley'
-
The Blue Star: A Novelby Tony EarleyISBN 0316199079 (0-316-19907-9)
Hardcover, Little Brown & Co
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Blue Star: A Novel'Book summary:Tony Earley's first novel was Jim the Boy and The Blue Star is its sequel. Time has moved forward to the eve of World War II, but everything else is much the same in the countryside of North Carolina. Jim Glass is now a senior in high school, living in the peaceful haven of his three uncles and his mother.
Love complicates his otherwise halcyon life, in the person of one Chrissie Steppe. We can't help whom we love, and Jim has made a big mistake by falling for Chrissie. She and her mother are in what amounts to indentured servitude up on the mountain, living on the property of the influential Bucklaws. Their son, Bucky, is in the Navy and expects that Chrissie will wait for him. She has nothing to say about it because she and her mother have nowhere to go if they are turned off Bucklaw's land because Chrissie has other ideas.
Earley's books are charming and evocative, calling back another time in this country when life was simpler, except in the realm of human emotions, which do not change with the times. He has a way of creating a time and place exactly as the people experiencing it would have felt, putting the reader in the picture. Finishing this book, the reader wonders what World War II and its aftermath will hold for Jim the boy, who is now a man. Perhaps Earley will tell us. --Valerie Ryan [via]
More editions of The Blue Star: A Novel:
Here We Are in Paradiseby Tony EarleyISBN 0316190896 (0-316-19089-6)
Softcover, Little Brown & Company
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Here We Are in Paradise: Stories'More editions of Here We Are in Paradise:
Jim the Boyby Tony EarleyISBN 1568959907 (1-56895-990-7)
Hardcover, Wheeler Pub Inc
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Jim the Boy'Book summary:Tony Earley made his debut with Here We Are in Paradise, a superbly understated collection of (mostly) small-town vignettes. He returns to the same terrain in his first novel, Jim the Boy, setting this coming-of-age story in a remote North Carolina hamlet. The year is 1934, and like the rest of the country, Aliceville is feeling the pinch of the Great Depression. Yet neither Jim nor his mother nor his three uncles--who have split the paternal role neatly among themselves since the death of Jim's father a decade earlier--are feeling much in the way of economic pain. Indeed, if you stuck a satellite dish on the front lawn, the story might be taking place in the New South rather than the older, bucolic one.
This isn't to suggest that Earley is deaf to social detail. Indeed, there are all sorts of wonderful touches, like the décor in Jim's classroom, with its "large, colorful maps of the United States, the Confederacy, and the Holy Land during the time of Jesus." But Jim the Boy is very much the tale of a 10-year-old's expanding consciousness, which at first barely extends beyond the family property. Earley has a real gift for conveying childhood epiphanies, like Jim's sudden apprehension of the wider world during a trip in Uncle Al's truck:
Two thoughts came to Jim at once, joined by a thread of amazement: he thought, People live here, and he thought, They don't know who I am. At that moment the world opened up around Jim like hands that, until that moment, had been cupped around him; he felt very small, almost invisible, in the open air of their center, but knew that the hands would not let him go. It was almost like flying.
The simple lyricism and anti-ironic sweetness work mostly to the book's advantage. There are times, it's true, when Earley sands his prose down to an unnatural smoothness, and we seem to be edging toward the sentimental precincts of a young-adult novel. But on the whole, Jim the Boy is a lovely, meticulous work--a song of innocence and (eventually) experience, delivered with just a hint of a North Carolina accent. --James Marcus [via]More editions of Jim the Boy:
- Jim the Boy: ISBN 0316198951 (0-316-19895-1)
Softcover, Little Brown & Co - Jim the Boy: ISBN 0316199648 (0-316-19964-8)
Hardcover, Little Brown & Co - Jim the Boy: ISBN 0606286756 (0-606-28675-6)
Hardcover, Demco Media - Jim the Boy: ISBN 0613338278 (0-613-33827-8)
Hardcover, Bt Bound - Jim the Boy: ISBN 1568959907 (1-56895-990-7)
Hardcover, Wheeler Pub Inc
- Jim the Boy: ISBN 0316198951 (0-316-19895-1)
New Stories from the Southby Tony Earley , Shannon RavenellISBN 156512247X (1-56512-247-X)
Softcover, Algonquin Books
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'New Stories from the South'More editions of New Stories from the South:
-
Somehow Form a Family: Stories That Are Mostly Trueby Tony EarleyISBN 1565123603 (1-56512-360-3)
Softcover, Algonquin Books
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Somehow Form a Family: Stories That Are Mostly True'Book summary: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 Anne Lamott's Traveling Mercies, in which a great writer rips open his or her heart and takes the reader inside for a no-holds-barred tour. Born thirty-nine years ago, Earley was too late to be a Baby Boomer, too soon to be a Gen Xer. Although he grew up in the North Carolina mountains, he says "I go around telling anyone who will listen that I am from the country, but deep down I know it's a lie. I grew up on Gilligan's Island, in Mayberry, I'm not sure where." Tony Earley's view of the world is from the edge, at the cusp. Which is what this collection of personal essays is about-about how he stands with one foot in the rural mountains and the other in the Brady Bunch's split-level, about how he's neither an adherent to the fundamentalist Christianity of his boyhood nor an unbeliever, and about how hard it is to find your place in the world without letting go of all you came from, without letting go of your authenticity. In a prose style that is deceptively simple (E. B. White comes to mind), Earley confronts the big things-God, death, civilization, family, his own clinical depression-with wit and grace, without looking away or smirking. Earley has clearly lost patience with irony, for his is a journey from faith, through disbelief, and into a new faith . . . and a new family. [via]
More editions of Somehow Form a Family: Stories That Are Mostly True:
![[powered by Muze Inc.]](http://i.bookfinder.com/images/site/muze/powered_by_muze.gif){kind=small}