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Get ’em Young, Treat ’em Tough, Tell ’em Nothing
- Author
- Robin McLean
- Narrator
- Dion Graham, Sophie Amoss
- Publisher
- Blackstone Publishing
- Publish Date
- 18 October 2022
- Run Time
- 7 hours 17 minutes
- Format
- Audiobook
What to expect
Dark, profane, and hilarious, yet ultimately humane, these ten stories are the latest and best of Robin McLean’s reports from the eternal battlefront that is the United States.
Ranging across the continent, from Alaska to Missouri, from the flatlands to the mountains, each tale is a snapshot of the political, racial, and sexual undercurrents roiling contemporary life, and each finds a way into the nerves and blood that pulse beneath the question of how to live a decent life.
Here you’ll find stolen children living life to the fullest on the run and on the road, soldiers guarding empty frontiers, and rugged individualists brought low by an uncaring nature. You’ll find prehistoric beasts rubbing talons with hustlers, as well as death machines lurking beneath the bucolic countryside. Here you’ll find hatred, friendship, and pitch-black humor all seething in the same stew.
Get ’em Young, Treat ’em Tough, Tell ’em Nothing marries the sardonic moral and political explorations of a Flannery O’Connor to the surreal, scuzzy wit of a Denis Johnson. It is a brazen State of the Union for a nation on the edge.
Critics Review
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“Grotesque, comic, and unsettling.”
The Guardian (London)
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“Graham and Amoss capture the dreamlike aspects of the stories and transform them into engrossing performances. Characters crackle with life, while the unusual elements of the stories…sound both real and unreal.”
AudioFile
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“In Robin McLean’s stories, life is tough but so are the living…Everyone here is on the edge of some kind of cliff, and McLean unsentimentally renders their various precipices with incredible energy and humor.”
New York Times
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“Sharp, noirish, thought-provoking stories of lives out of joint.”
Kirkus Reviews
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“Offers up a gritty and well-honed collection of mischief, desperation, and disaster in the American West…with merciless prose and a bold vision.”
Publishers Weekly
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“No writer casts a sharper light on the feral edges of the human condition than Robin McLean.”
John Larison, author of Whiskey When We’re Dry
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“These tales are so surprisingly original, so strange and moving, so funny, so irreverent, I swallowed them, I ate them whole.”
Deb Olin Unferth, author of Barn 8
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“Not since Jesus’ Son have I read a book of stories that so resonated in my soul. McLean’s prose sings with a fierceness that is ornate and sparse, spiritual and secular, peaceful and violent.”
Christian Kiefer, author of The Animals
User Reviews
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Details
- Author
- Robin McLean
- Narrator
- Dion Graham, Sophie Amoss
- Duration
- 7 hours 17 minutes
- Release Date
- 18 October 2022
- ISBN
- 9798212337007
- Format
- Audiobook
- Publisher
- Blackstone Publishing
- Genre
- Crime and mystery: hard-boiled crime, noir fiction, Short stories
Synopsis
Dark, profane, and hilarious, yet ultimately humane, these ten stories are the latest and best of Robin McLean’s reports from the eternal battlefront that is the United States.Ranging across the continent, from Alaska to Missouri, from the flatlands to the mountains, each tale is a snapshot of the political, racial, and sexual undercurrents roiling contemporary life, and each finds a way into the nerves and blood that pulse beneath the question of how to live a decent life.Here you’ll find stolen children living life to the fullest on the run and on the road, soldiers guarding empty frontiers, and rugged individualists brought low by an uncaring nature. You’ll find prehistoric beasts rubbing talons with hustlers, as well as death machines lurking beneath the bucolic countryside. Here you’ll find hatred, friendship, and pitch-black humor all seething in the same stew.Get ’em Young, Treat ’em Tough, Tell ’em Nothing marries the sardonic moral and political explorations of a Flannery O’Connor to the surreal, scuzzy wit of a Denis Johnson. It is a brazen State of the Union for a nation on the edge.
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