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The Afterlife - by Donald Antrim (Paperback)
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About this item
Highlights
- A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice In the winter of 2000, shortly after his mother's death, Donald Antrim began writing about his family.
- About the Author: Donald Antrim is the author of Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World, The Hundred Brothers, and The Verificationist, and is a regular contributor to The New Yorker.
- 208 Pages
- Biography + Autobiography, Personal Memoirs
Description
About the Book
From "a fiercely intelligent writer" ("The New York Times") comes a wry, poignant story of the difficult love between a mother and a son. Antrim comes to terms with--and fails to comes to terms with--the nature of addiction and the broken states of loneliness, shame, and loss that remain beyond his power to fully repair.
Book Synopsis
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
In the winter of 2000, shortly after his mother's death, Donald Antrim began writing about his family. In pieces that appeared in The New Yorker and were anthologized in Best American Essays, Antrim explored his intense and complicated relationships with his mother, Louanne, an artist, teacher, and ferociously destabilizing alcoholic; his gentle grandfather, who lived in the mountains of North Carolina and who always hoped to save his daughter from herself; and his father, who married his mother twice.
The Afterlife is an elliptical, sometimes tender, sometimes blackly hilarious portrait of a family--faulty, cracked, enraging--and of a man struggling to learn the nature of his origins.
Review Quotes
"The Afterlife is like nothing else. With tenderness, humor, and insight, Donald Antrim evokes the volatile atmosphere of the home that he and his sister shared with mother Louanne. . . . Should be required reading for everyone who has been haunted by the restless ghosts of those they love most." --Francine Prose, People
"The book is very funny when it wants to be, but in between it is rueful. . . . It's Antrim's best book so far." --Joan Acocella, The New York Review of Books
"A memoir glimmering with hard-won beauty and alive with meaning." --Newsday
"An unsettling yet exhilarating read." --USA Today
About the Author
Donald Antrim is the author of Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World, The Hundred Brothers, and The Verificationist, and is a regular contributor to The New Yorker. He lives in New York City.