- Shopping Bag ( 0 items )
Available on NOOK devices and apps
Need a NOOK? Explore Now
Need a NOOK? Explore Now
"Twisted Tree makes me think of Winesburg, and the fine line between plain folks and grotesques—how one day, through the quirks of circumstance, we find ourselves on the other side of that line, and wonder how long we've been there. Like Russell Banks in The Sweet Hereafter, Kent Meyers spins out his intimate life stories from the hub of a small-town tragedy and takes us into places we never thought we'd go."
--Stewart O'Nan, author of Songs for the Missing
"Twisted Tree is a piercing and original book, beautifully written and conceived. In it Kent Meyers has created a lyrical atlas, revealing all that lies beneath his indelible world of freeway towns and bison ranches--a haunted territory of regret, longing and guilt."
-- Jess Walter, author of Citizen Vince
"A master wordsmith and storyteller, Kent Meyers brings us characters who, like so many of us, take years, a lifetime even to face their histories, lying to each other and themselves along the way. I don't come across novels like this very often -- gorgeously written, addictively entertaining, suspenseful, and spirit-full." -- Susan Power, author of The Grass Dancer
"In the riveting pages of Twisted Tree, Kent Meyers has expanded the map of his imaginative territory to produce his own brand of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County on the stark Midwestern plains. Present and past collide, exposing the delicate mix of history and dream that shapes the American landscape." -- Judith Kitchen, author of The House on Eccles Road
"Twisted Tree brings all of the dynamics of rural America to life with vivid prose and true to life characters. Kent Meyers is writing some of the most groundbreaking novels about the West today." --Russell Rowland, author of In Open Spaces
The kidnapper, Alexander Stouton, is a fat, demonic psychopath. Elise, the middle-aged grocery checker, who at 16 was a lay missionary in South America, tells us something of Hayley Jo. "She had an air of reverence and distance. I saw myself when I was her age -- that sense of martyrdom and purity, of watching others' needs." We meet the town's eclectic collection: Sophie, who has returned, after a ten-year absence, to help her mother after her mother's husband has a stroke; Eddie Little Feather, a comical drunk, eventually run over by a truck; the grieving Zimmerman parents; Hayley's friend Laura; a maniac poacher who is never caught in the act; and a sinful former priest. These characters share a commonality of voice and action with those in Annie Proulx's trilogy of Wyoming Stories. But the creations in this gripping novel transcend Proulx's often absurd caricatures, as Meyers writes with a Faulknerian sympathy for his characters that is frequently nonexistent in Proulx. Meyers's westerners would not be out of place in Yoknapatawpha County. --Joseph Peschel
Anonymous
Posted February 21, 2010
I Also Recommend:
I bought this book because the cover got me when I was browzing. The anguished horse at the wire made me want to read the book without knowing anything about it.
It did not fail. This book was fascinating -- I disocvered the events in the rear mirror, through the ruminations of characters about the events, while also revealing their complicated lives in this Dakota town, with its distances, yearnings for the bright lights, and acceptance of the inevitable, with humor the only protection.
The book held me and I had to stay up all night reading it. Then I read Work of Wolves, an earlier Meyers book, and thought it wonderful. Now I have to find Combine somewhere (not available through B&N).
Anyway, if you like Jim Harrison, you will like Kent Meyers. They have the same long view.
Anonymous
Posted December 28, 2009
No text was provided for this review.
Anonymous
Posted October 29, 2009
No text was provided for this review.
Anonymous
Posted December 19, 2009
No text was provided for this review.
Anonymous
Posted February 15, 2010
No text was provided for this review.
Anonymous
Posted April 10, 2011
No text was provided for this review.
Anonymous
Posted January 16, 2010
No text was provided for this review.
Anonymous
Posted December 27, 2010
No text was provided for this review.
Anonymous
Posted April 15, 2010
No text was provided for this review.
Anonymous
Posted November 1, 2010
No text was provided for this review.
Anonymous
Posted December 26, 2009
No text was provided for this review.
Anonymous
Posted January 7, 2010
No text was provided for this review.
Anonymous
Posted December 31, 2009
No text was provided for this review.
Anonymous
Posted November 11, 2009
No text was provided for this review.
Overview
Praise for Twisted Tree"Twisted Tree makes me think of Winesburg, and the fine line between plain folks and grotesques—how one day, through the quirks of circumstance, we find ourselves on the other side of that line, and wonder how long we've been there. Like Russell Banks in The Sweet Hereafter, Kent Meyers spins out his intimate life stories from the hub of a small-town tragedy and takes us into places we never thought we'd go."
--Stewart O'Nan, author of Songs for the Missing
"Twisted Tree is a piercing and original book, beautifully written and conceived. In it Kent Meyers has ...