The Cry of the Sloth

( 2 )
Pick Up In Store

Pick Up in Store

Reserve and pick up in 60 minutes at your local store

Paperback
$10.25
BN.com price
$14.95 List Price (Save 31%)
Marketplace (New and Used)
from
$0.01
$14.95 List Price (Save 100%)
Usually ships in 1-2 business days
All (57)  
Used (43)  
New (14)  
Close
Sort by
Page 1 of 6
Showing 1 – 10 of 57 (6 pages)
$0.01
(Save 100%)
Better World Books
Seller since 2006

Feedback rating:

(50900)

Condition:

New — never opened or used in original packaging.

Like New — packaging may have been opened. A "Like New" item is suitable to give as a gift.

Very Good — may have minor signs of wear on packaging but item works perfectly and has no damage.

Good — item is in good condition but packaging may have signs of shelf wear/aging or torn packaging. All specific defects should be noted in the Comments section associated with each item.

Acceptable — item is in working order but may show signs of wear such as scratches or torn packaging. All specific defects should be noted in the Comments section associated with each item.

Used — An item that has been opened and may show signs of wear. All specific defects should be noted in the Comments section associated with each item.

Refurbished — A used item that has been renewed or updated and verified to be in proper working condition. Not necessarily completed by the original manufacturer.

Good
Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. 100% Money Back Guarantee. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy!

Ships from: Mishawaka, IN

Usually ships in 1-2 business days

  • •Canadian
  • •International
  • •Standard, 48 States
  • •Standard (AK, HI)
  • •Express, 48 States
  • •Express (AK, HI)
$0.01
(Save 100%)
OwlsBooks-TRM
Seller since 2009

Feedback rating:

(22569)

Condition: Very Good
Giving great service since 2004: Buy from the Best! 4,000,000 items shipped to delighted customers. We have 1,000,000 unique items ready to ship! Find your Great Buy today!

Ships from: Lakewood, WA

Usually ships in 1-2 business days

  • •Canadian
  • •International
  • •Standard, 48 States
  • •Standard (AK, HI)
  • •Express, 48 States
  • •Express (AK, HI)
$0.01
(Save 100%)
Discover Books Ltd.
Seller since 2006

Feedback rating:

(3584)

Condition: Very Good
Very Good Some wear on book from reading, we guarantee all purchases and ship all items via USPS mail.

Ships from: Sumas, WA

Usually ships in 1-2 business days

  • •Standard, 48 States
  • •Standard (AK, HI)
$0.01
(Save 100%)
GreatTimeBooks
Seller since 2009

Feedback rating:

(551)

Condition: Very Good
Very good copy, minimal signs of use. We ship all orders daily, M-F, and have a superior Customer Service team. Buy with confidence! BN

Ships from: Lakewood, WA

Usually ships in 1-2 business days

  • •International
  • •Standard, 48 States
  • •Standard (AK, HI)
  • •Express, 48 States
  • •Express (AK, HI)
$0.01
(Save 100%)
BreakTimeBooks
Seller since 2009

Feedback rating:

(664)

Condition: Very Good
Read once or twice. We ship daily via USPS. Buy with the best! BN

Ships from: Lakewood, WA

Usually ships in 1-2 business days

  • •International
  • •Standard, 48 States
  • •Standard (AK, HI)
  • •Express, 48 States
  • •Express (AK, HI)
$1.25
(Save 92%)
Cathy's Half Price Books PA
Seller since 2005

Feedback rating:

(1335)

Condition: Very Good
2009 Paperback Very Good Very good, gently used no marks damages or labels. Thanks for your business! Your satisfaction is guaranteed!

Ships from: Havertown, PA

Usually ships in 1-2 business days

  • •Canadian
  • •International
  • •Standard, 48 States
  • •Standard (AK, HI)
  • •Express, 48 States
  • •Express (AK, HI)
$1.49
(Save 90%)
Browse4books2
Seller since 2007

Feedback rating:

(466)

Condition: Good
used library discard w/ library markings and barcode, clean pgs, in VERY GOOD condition for library discard

Ships from: Kokomo, IN

Usually ships in 1-2 business days

  • •Canadian
  • •International
  • •Standard, 48 States
  • •Standard (AK, HI)
  • •Express, 48 States
  • •Express (AK, HI)
$1.99
(Save 87%)
BookBuyers Online1 CA
Seller since 2007

Feedback rating:

(2397)

Condition: New
2009 Paperback New -May have sticker on cover.

Ships from: San Jose, CA

Usually ships in 1-2 business days

  • •Canadian
  • •International
  • •Standard, 48 States
  • •Standard (AK, HI)
  • •Express, 48 States
  • •Express (AK, HI)
$1.99
(Save 87%)
New Chapter Recycling
Seller since 2010

Feedback rating:

(3302)

Condition: Good

Ships from: Lakewood, WA

Usually ships in 1-2 business days

  • •Canadian
  • •International
  • •Standard, 48 States
  • •Standard (AK, HI)
  • •Express, 48 States
  • •Express (AK, HI)
$1.99
(Save 87%)
BookBuyers Online1 CA
Seller since 2007

Feedback rating:

(2397)

Condition: Good
2009 Paperback -Meets or exceeds the guidelines for GOOD condition. May have minimal wear or damage; may have previous owner's signature.

Ships from: San Jose, CA

Usually ships in 1-2 business days

  • •Canadian
  • •International
  • •Standard, 48 States
  • •Standard (AK, HI)
  • •Express, 48 States
  • •Express (AK, HI)
Page 1 of 6
Showing 1 – 10 of 57 (6 pages)
Close
Sort by
NOOK Book (eBook)
$8.99
BN.com price
$9.99 List Price (Save 10%)

Available on NOOK devices and apps

  • Nook Devices
  • NOOK
  • NOOK Color
  • NOOK Tablet
  • Tablet/Phone
  • NOOK for iPad
  • NOOK for iPhone
  • NOOK for Android
  • NOOK for Android (Tablet)
  • NOOK Kids for iPad
  • PC/Mac
  • NOOK Study
  • NOOK for PC
  • NOOK for Mac

Want a NOOK? Explore Now

More About This Book

Overview

Fiction. Chosen by Publishers Weekly as one of the Best Books of 2009. Living on a diet of fried Spam, vodka, sardines, cupcakes, and Southern Comfort, Andrew Whittaker is slowly being sucked into the morass of middle age. A negligent landlord, small-time literary journal editor, and aspiring novelist, he is—quite literally—authoring his own downfall. From his letters, diary entries, and fragments of fiction, to grocery lists and posted signs, this novel is a collection of everything Whittaker commits to paper over the course of four critical months. Beginning in July, during the economic hardships of the Nixon era, we witness our hero hounded by tenants and creditors, harassed by a loathsome local arts group, and tormented by his ex-wife. In this tragicomic portrait of a literary life, Sam Savage proves that all the evidence is in the writing, that all the world is, indeed, a stage, and that escape from the mind's prison requires a command performance.

Editorial Reviews

Joseph Salvatore
Savage's satire is in many places spot on and funny in a way that will make other writers squirm.
—The New York Times
Publishers Weekly

Middle-aged underachiever Andy Whittaker plots a preposterous literary festival in this scathingly funny epistolary pastiche from Firmin author Savage. Andy is the editor of Soap, an inconsequential literary magazine ridiculed by rival The Art News, which Andy dismisses as "the in-house journal for a tiny clique of very conventional, very middle-class writers and painters." His wife, Jolie, has left him, his mother is dying and the apartment buildings inherited from his father are crumbling. Fern Moss, a precocious poetess, taunts Andy with provocative poems and photos, while Dahlberg Stint, a hardware store employee and former Soap contributor, sends increasingly sinister threats. After his phone is shut off, a beleaguered Andy hunkers down to compose plaintive letters to Jolie, excuses for not visiting his mother, dismissive replies to Soap hopefuls, snide notes to his tenants, pitiful missives to a former one-night-stand, fake letters to the editor and "prose poems, little existential parables of tedium and despair, set in Africa probably." Andy's self-aggrandizing and self-pitying grow more desperate as Savage expertly skewers Andy's comically insufferable exterior to reveal the tragic if insubstantial soul of a frustrated writer. (Sept.)

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
More Reviews (2) Fewer Reviews
Library Journal
At an age when many authors are pushing stylistic walkers, 68-year-old Savage is just hitting his stride. His new work is every bit as engaging and original as his debut, Firmin. Protagonist Andrew Whittaker, like the rat Firmin, is something of a literary lowlife. He's a writer who is a legend in his own mind, the vexing editor of a marginal literary journal, an incompetent slumlord, an increasingly tired and tiresome bore and boor, a man about to crash from his own imaginary space into a very unforgiving earth. This novel consists of everything he has written over four months: mostly letters but also remnants of his tortuous prose, shopping lists, and diary entries. VERDICT Set in the early Seventies, this book will certainly appeal to boomers and seniors, but it would also be a great read for young adults. Its best audience would be other writers and creative individuals generally, and it would be a delightful reading-group choice. Great for holiday gift-giving, too.—Jim Dwyer, California State Univ. Lib., Chico
Kirkus Reviews
Four months in the life of a desperate, depressed and sexually frustrated landlord. Andrew Whittaker blames "low-quality tenants" for the disrepair of his buildings in the Midwestern town of Rapid Falls. He has a somewhat better relationship with estranged wife Jolie, even though she left him to pursue an (unsuccessful) acting career in New York City. Letters to Jolie and a variety of significant others chronicle the declining fortunes of Andy's real-estate holdings and of Soap: A Journal of the Arts, the literary publication he founded and edits. Savage (Firmin: Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife, 2006) intersperses as well grocery lists, rental ads ("BIG AND COZY!"), rejection form letters and fragments of what Andy describes as "an odd little something which I suppose we'll have to call a novel," whose protagonist is plainly his alter ego. Correspondence also documents sexual behavior that might seem inappropriate and/or despicable, but mostly comes across pathetic. Andy attempts to change his luck by planning a literary festival that sounds more like a circus or carnival: Its slogan is, "Far Out is Fun"; attractions include elephants and bumper cars. "I thought we could give the cars the names of literary fashions-Romanticism, Realism, etc.-and a person could choose his affiliation and crash it into the others," he says to an aspiring poet he's hoping to seduce, despite the fact that she's a schoolgirl. Andy attempts to convince former friends who have become successful writers to participate in the festival without recompense, but the only result from such missives is that one of them starts seeing Jolie. His solipsistic ravings barely acknowledge the Nixon presidency during whichthese letters are written. Indomitable human spirit, or a master of self-delusion? Either way, Andy is a triumphant achievement, squirm-inducingly credible and the palpitating heart of this very funny, very dark novel.

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9781566892315
  • Publisher: Coffee House Press
  • Publication date: 9/1/2009
  • Pages: 224
  • Sales rank: 838,395
  • Product dimensions: 5.04 (w) x 7.82 (h) x 0.69 (d)

Meet the Author

Sam Savage
Sam Savage

Sam Savage is the author of the bestseller Firmin: Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife, an American Library Association Notable Book and Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award finalist. A native of South Carolina, Savage holds a PhD in philosophy from Yale University, was once an editor of a literary quarterly, and now lives in Madison, Wisconsin.

Biography

Sam Savage grew up in a small town in South Carolina in the '40s and '50s. Then he went north, first to Boston and New York, and later to France and Germany. He studied at the University of Heidelberg and at Yale, eventually acquiring a Ph.D. in philosophy from Yale. He taught there, briefly and unhappily. It was a period when many had become convinced that there are no genuine philosophic problems, only genuine linguistic puzzles. This discovery did not leave any "career options" for Savage, since the only puzzle that interested him at that time was himself. In 1980 he went back south, to McClellanville, South Carolina (pop. 400), where he spent the next twenty-three years. He worked as a carpenter, a commercial fisherman, and a letterpress printer. He lived, however, mainly on a diminishing pile of inherited money and the labors of his wife, while he attempted to write, pretended to write, and often really did write. Most of the things he wrote have not survived. In 2003, he moved north again, this time to Madison, Wisconsin, where he now lives.

Savage has proved to be the most persistant and annoying of the Old Rat's fictions.

Biography courtesy of the author's official web site.

Good To Know

Some fun and fascinating outtakes from our interview with Savage:

"Two years before starting Firmin, I wrote a long story in a ragged verse form I like to call high doggerel. I persuaded my sister, the artist Virginia Beverley, to illustrate it, and we posted the whole thing on the web as The Criminal Life of Effie O. It is now available as a paperback book. Effie O was the first thing I wrote after I had learned not to give a damn. I wrote it for my sister, to whom I would read chapters over the phone as I finished them, and my wife, Nora, who I knew would like it, and for the joy of it."

"As for the inspiration for my writing, I don't plan a novel, don't start off with an idea or plot, such as 'a story about a literate rat in a Boston bookstore.' When I began writing Firmin I didn't even know Firmin was a rat, I didn't know he was in Boston, I didn't know it was a novel. If I am not working on a story, I sit at the typewriter (or now the computer) and just type without any leading idea, the writing equivalent I suppose of an aimless walk. Most of the time nothing comes of it, but not always. I rewrite a paragraph several times before I go on to next one. I try not to think about where it's all going, out of fear that of forcing the story in a preconceived direction rather than letting the direction emerge from the writing."

"As for jobs, I have probably had a greater variety than most people, but I have spent much more time sitting in armchairs doing what some have described unkindly as 'staring into space.' The riches this activity (and it was an activity) brought in, however, have not been convertible to cash. Among jobs I got paid for doing my favorite was working a crab boat along the coast of South Carolina, where I had returned after leaving the university. For six or seven hours a day I was alone in a boat in the marsh creeks, often not seeing another human from the time I left the dock to the time I returned. When I shut off the engine to cull my catch, the only sounds were birds, wind, and water. I thought, and still think, I was in those moments the luckiest person on earth."

"These days my pleasures are small and local. I walk by the lakes. I watch movies on video. I go out once or twice a week for lunch in some little restaurant. I read. My dislikes are large and universal. I have an aversion to jargon. Especially academic jargon. I dream that one morning all the cars in the city will fail to start. I anguish over war and famine. I read the news obsessively. I fume. I think I rant."

    1. Hometown:
      Madison, Wisconsin
    1. Date of Birth:
      November 9, 1940
    2. Place of Birth:
      Camden, South Carolina
    1. Education:
      B.A. in Philosophy, Yale, 1968; University of Heidelberg (2 years), Ph.D. in Philosophy, Yale, 1979
    2. Website:
      http://www.theoldrat.com

Customer Reviews

Average Rating 5
( 2 )

Rating Distribution

5 Star

(2)

4 Star

(0)

3 Star

(0)

2 Star

(0)

1 Star

(0)

Your Rating:

Review Guidelines
Add Recommendations
Your Name: Create a Pen Name or Leave Anonymously

Barnes & Noble.com Review Rules

Our reader reviews allow you to share your comments on titles you liked, or didn't, with others. By submitting an online review, you are representing to Barnes & Noble.com that all information contained in your review is original and accurate in all respects, and that the submission of such content by you and the posting of such content by Barnes & Noble.com does not and will not violate the rights of any third party. Please follow the rules below to help ensure that your review can be posted.

Reviews by Our Customers Under the Age of 13

We highly value and respect everyone's opinion concerning the titles we offer. However, we cannot allow persons under the age of 13 to have accounts at BN.com or to post customer reviews. Please see our Terms of Use for more details.

What to exclude from your review:

Please do not write about reviews, commentary, or information posted on the product page. If you see any errors in the information on the product page, please send us an email.

Reviews should not contain any of the following:

  • - HTML tags, profanity, obscenities, vulgarities, or comments that defame anyone
  • - Time-sensitive information such as tour dates, signings, lectures, etc.
  • - Single-word reviews. Other people will read your review to discover why you liked or didn't like the title. Be descriptive.
  • - Comments focusing on the author or that may ruin the ending for others
  • - Phone numbers, addresses, URLs
  • - Pricing and availability information or alternative ordering information
  • - Advertisements or commercial solicitation

Reminder:

  • - By submitting a review, you grant to Barnes & Noble.com and its sublicensees the royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable right and license to use the review in accordance with the Barnes & Noble.com Terms of Use.
  • - Barnes & Noble.com reserves the right not to post any review -- particularly those that do not follow the terms and conditions of these Rules. Barnes & Noble.com also reserves the right to remove any review at any time without notice.
  • - See Terms of Use for other conditions and disclaimers.
Search for Products You'd Like to Recommend

Recommend other products that relate to your review. Just search for them below and share!

Create a Pen Name

Your Pen Name is your unique identiy on BN.com. It will appear on the reviews you write and other website activities. Your Pen Name cannot be edited, changed or deleted once submitted.

Your Pen Name can be any combination of alphanumeric characters (plus - and _), and must be at least two characters long.

Continue Anonymously

We're sorry, but penname is already taken.

Please select one of the following:
Your Pen Name can be any combination of alphanumeric characters (plus - and _), and must be at least two characters long.

Continue Anonymously

penname is available!

By visiting the BN.com website or marking a purchase on BN.com, a User is deemed to have accepted the Terms of Use.

Continue Anonymously

Welcome, penname

You have successfully created your Pen Name. Start enjoying the benefits of the BN.com Community today.

Sort by: Showing all of 2 Customer Reviews

  • Anonymous

    Posted October 22, 2009

    No text was provided for this review.

  • Anonymous

    Posted October 20, 2011

    No text was provided for this review.

Sort by: Showing all of 2 Customer Reviews
If you find inappropriate content, please report it to Barnes & Noble
Why is this product inappropriate?
Comments (optional)
500 character limit