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Book Cover for: Well, Matthew McIntosh

Well

Matthew McIntosh

Well marks the astonishing debut of an author with a singular and unflinching voice and vision. The denizens of this brilliant novel are boxers, bartenders, and data-entry technicians, fishermen, mothers, and exotic dancers, would-be kings and queens of the punk rock scene, sparemen and gunmen and soon-to-be dead men. What binds them is the Well-that dark barren region of the human heart and mind. Whether desperately alone or struggling to come together, they grapple with dangerous compulsions and heartrending afflictions, searching for relief, transcendence, or a vehicle up into the light they know must exist. They search in sex, drugs, and violence, and in visions of apocalypse and creation, dreams of angels and killers and local sports championships. Compact, finely wrought, and powerfully charged, Well is a mesmerizing tour de force that will establish Matthew McIntosh as a bold and progressive new voice of American fiction.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Grove Press
  • Publish Date: Jun 2nd, 2004
  • Pages: 288
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 8.24in - 5.54in - 0.78in - 0.73lb
  • EAN: 9780802141439
  • Categories: Literary

Praise for this book

"At last we've found the young writer who will carry us into the new millennium. Matthew McIntosh brilliantly displays the world of today with bleak love, desperate hope, and ruthless compassion. The top writer of his generation."
"A brilliant meditation of the way in which human beings invest in various sourts of meanings--a game, a body (your own or someone else's), a drug--and how this investment never quite delivers what you thought it would. It's a verbally pyrotechnic, formally exciting, and emotionally devastating book."
"The humanity of the people sings off the page. They are not characters in a book, but rather living beings with all the hopes, dreams, fears, loves, hates, illusions, and rationalizations that are part of the human dilemma. A book that still resonates in my heart."
"Daringly structured ... McIntosh shows a remarkable facility for capturing different voices, the way people speak and think in their most private moments, the circular, stammering way that inarticulate people describe pivotal moments of their lives....Extremely involving and interesting."