Stories for Boys: A Memoir
Read Stories for Boys: A Memoir Online
Authors: Gregory Martin
Table of Contents
Praise for
Stories For Boys: A Memoir
Stories For Boys: A Memoir
With clean vivid descriptions, and ruthless soul-wrenching self-examination, Greg Martin bravely tells a story he never imagined having to tell. The reader is privileged here, to be allowed to watch as he wrestles with his sons, his own belief systems, his urge toward forgiveness and even Walt Whitman. This finely made, deeply felt memoir restores our faith in the power of language and story to make sense of a broken world.
PAM HOUSTON, author of
Contents May Have Shifted
Contents May Have Shifted
Stories for Boys
is a charming and moving coming-of-age story, its narrator situated in the pivotal position between being his father’s son and his sons’ father. So refreshing and unique is Martin’s treatment of the material that the reader will never mistake this book for its inferior competitors dealing with similar subjects (suicide, latent homosexuality, child abuse). One hopes this is the new wave of memoir: stories of people whose lives are not easily categorized nor dismissed. It is a sweet read.
is a charming and moving coming-of-age story, its narrator situated in the pivotal position between being his father’s son and his sons’ father. So refreshing and unique is Martin’s treatment of the material that the reader will never mistake this book for its inferior competitors dealing with similar subjects (suicide, latent homosexuality, child abuse). One hopes this is the new wave of memoir: stories of people whose lives are not easily categorized nor dismissed. It is a sweet read.
ANTONYA NELSON, author of
Bound
Bound
Gregory Martin’s
Stories for Boys
is a magnetic meditation on what happens when a decades-long lie is brutally revealed. Moving, brave, and unforgettable, this deeply personal book pushes us all further into the light.
Stories for Boys
is a magnetic meditation on what happens when a decades-long lie is brutally revealed. Moving, brave, and unforgettable, this deeply personal book pushes us all further into the light.
CHERYL STRAYED, author of
Wild
Wild
Praise for
Mountain City
Mountain City
New York Times
Notable Book of the Year, 2000
Library Journal
, Best Books of 2000
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
, Best Northwest Books, 2000
Notable Book of the Year, 2000
Library Journal
, Best Books of 2000
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
, Best Northwest Books, 2000
Crystalline …
Mountain City
, part elegy, part defiance of the elegiac, is the winter view from northern Nevada.
Mountain City
, part elegy, part defiance of the elegiac, is the winter view from northern Nevada.
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
A crisp elegy to an almost vanished American West.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY
Mountain City celebrates the alternate Western seasons of promise and pessimism, arrival and abandonment. Hardened like the place he sketches against the vagaries of life, Martin writes sensitively without being maudlin, as if pity were something he discovered late in life.
THE DENVER POST
Life in a dying Western town has found its worthy chronicler … A poetic, tender look at Mountain City, Nevada (population 33), and its denizens … Martin deftly illuminates the soul and characters behind the crumbling facades.”
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
Describes the relationships between people … with precision and care. Highly recommended for all libraries.
LIBRARY JOURNAL
Martin’s is a melancholy song, lovely and heartfelt.
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
Gregory Martin’s
Mountain City
, which describes a small community (thirty-three inhabitants when the books opens, thirty-one when it ends) in the mountains of Nevada, is not only a tender and evocative portrait of a place, but also a loving description of Martin’s own extended family, who are descended from Cornish miners and Basque sheepherders.”
Mountain City
, which describes a small community (thirty-three inhabitants when the books opens, thirty-one when it ends) in the mountains of Nevada, is not only a tender and evocative portrait of a place, but also a loving description of Martin’s own extended family, who are descended from Cornish miners and Basque sheepherders.”
NANCY PEARL, author of
Booklust : Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment and Reason
Booklust : Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment and Reason
A keen and witty observer … Martin shows how frailty is woven into the fabric of relations; he maintains an immediacy that highlights the humanity of his subjects … gorgeously written, meticulously observed.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the rural West we’re sometimes lucky and get the good books we deserve:
Old Jules
,
Housekeeping
,
The Meadow
, and now
Mountain City
. Northern Elko County is its own nation, and this is its sweet, ironic anthem.
Old Jules
,
Housekeeping
,
The Meadow
, and now
Mountain City
. Northern Elko County is its own nation, and this is its sweet, ironic anthem.
WILLIAM KITTREDGE, author of
Hole in the Sky
Hole in the Sky
Mountain City
is at the crossroads of the Western heart – the specific old loved place amid life’s inexorable routes to elsewhere. With a jeweler’s eye and a descendant’s respectful affection, Gregory Martin has caught the cadences of life and lingo in this little Nevada spot that still counts for so much in the American story.
is at the crossroads of the Western heart – the specific old loved place amid life’s inexorable routes to elsewhere. With a jeweler’s eye and a descendant’s respectful affection, Gregory Martin has caught the cadences of life and lingo in this little Nevada spot that still counts for so much in the American story.
IVAN DOIG, author of
This House of Sky
This House of Sky
…Well-written, sweet, yet unsentimental, telling the shared history of a community that’s vanishing.
USA TODAY
In prose as clear and full of light as the Western sky,
Mountain City
presents a way of life once common in America, now fading like a sunset. This book simmers with insight and wisdom about family – and a few good jokes, too.
Mountain City
presents a way of life once common in America, now fading like a sunset. This book simmers with insight and wisdom about family – and a few good jokes, too.
CHRIS OFFUTT, author of
Out of the Woods
Out of the Woods
Gregory Martin draws a gently humorous, sensitive sketch of Mountain City and its crusty citizens.
EVAN S. CONNELL, author of
Son of the Morning Star
Son of the Morning Star
Rarely is the story of a place and its people told with such exacting lyricism, clarity and love. Gregory Martin has such a refined eye and ear that this book, composed from mosaic chips of memory, accumulates into one of the most beautiful and significant portraits of an extended family living and dying in the American West that I have ever read.
ALISON HAWTHORNE DEMING, author of
The Edges of the Civilized World
The Edges of the Civilized World
Gregory Martin has illuminated the lives of the residents of Mountain City, Nevada, like the pages of a medieval manuscript. They glow from within. The book is a classic – simple, elegant, and devastating.
RICHARD SHELTON, author of
Going Back to Bisbee
Going Back to Bisbee
In the enchanting microcosm that is
Mountain City
, author Gregory Martin has captured the character of Basques everywhere.
Mountain City
, author Gregory Martin has captured the character of Basques everywhere.
ROBERT LAXALT, author of
Sweet Promised Land
Sweet Promised Land
For my sons, Oliver and Evan.
A Phone Call
WE WERE WRESTLING ON THE BED WHEN EVAN FELL OFF headfirst. I saw him go over, his feet and legs rising briefly in the air as he rolled backwards. Then he disappeared. There was an awful thud. I was on all fours; Oliver was sitting on my back. He didn’t stop strangling me, but I stopped making my agonal death rattle. Evan gained his feet and shook his head like a wide receiver after getting clotheslined by a linebacker on a route across the middle. Evan was four years old, pale and skinny, his dirty blonde hair sprouting in all directions.
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