For the first time in one volume, three modern masterworks from the National Book Award-winning writer who has been called the American Graham Greene.
Robert Stone (1937-2015) was born in Brooklyn and grew up in New
York City. After being expelled from high school Stone enlisted in
the U.S. Navy, where he served as a journalist. In the early 1960s
he studied writing as a Stegner Fellow at Stanford and became
friends with Ken Kesey. His first novel, A Hall of Mirrors, was
published in 1967; his second, Dog Soldiers (1974), won the
National Book Award. Stone eventually published eight novels, two
collections of short stories, and a memoir.
Madison Smartt Bell is professor of English at Goucher College and
the author of fifteen novels, three collections of short stories,
and five works of nonfiction. He is the author of Child of Light- A
Biography of Robert Stone (working title), which will be published
by Doubleday in March/April 2020, and the editor of The Eye You See
With- Selected Nonfiction of Robert Stone (working title), also
scheduled by Houghton Mifflin for March/April 2020.
"A look back at the writer and his work, especially his earliest
novels, turns out to be well timed. In books that deserve to
endure, Stone anticipates the present in surprising, unsettling
ways. . . . Stone’s America is a dark place, but its failures
are commensurate with the scale of its aspirations. His
protagonists—they can be roughly divided into seekers and ironists,
each representing aspects of their creator—are haunted by a vision
of life more abundant, a sense of possibility that’s betrayed by
their own weakness and the destabilizing undercurrents of history.
His prose, with its potent mix of hard-boiled irony, romantic
excess, and violent dissolution, can render the mood of a whole
period instantly indelible." —George Packer, The
Atlantic
"We can be even more grateful for the new Library of America
volume, . . . which puts between two handsome covers three of
Stone’s finest novels. . . . Its 1,000 pages contain some of
the most handsomely composed, brilliantly perceptive, and painfully
honest fiction produced by any postwar American writer. . . . [I]ts
contents will engage you, then provoke you, and then break your
fucking heart." —Rob Latham, Los Angeles Review of Books
"A trifecta of thoroughbreds. . . . The Library of America volume
showcases Stone at his fearsome peak . . . ordered,
propulsive, hyperrealistic yet phantasmagoric with great bursts of
rabid thinking."
—Joy Williams, Bookforum
"Intricately plotted and often suspenseful, [Stone's] fiction tends
to run a low-grade fever generated by ambition, racism, fear,
drugs, and alcohol, conveyed in a tone that has the odd property of
being both frightening and disconcertingly funny. In this
particular mode, Stone was unsurpassed, and at least two of his
novels, A Flag for Sunrise and Outerbridge Reach, . . . have a
political scope, eloquence, and cultural knowingness that qualifies
them as great novels."
—Charles Baxter, Harper's Magazine
“Robert Stone belonged to the remarkable cohort of American fiction
writers born in the 1930s. . . . [This] superbly produced Library
of America volume gathering three of [his] novels, . . . makes a
case for a full-fledged revival. There can be no doubt that such an
effort is timely.”
—The American Conservative
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