- Paperback: 220 pages
- Published: 8/1/07
- IBSN: 9781933354309
- e-IBSN: 9781617750083
- Genre: Fiction
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Tender as Hellfire
What people are saying…
“Tender As Hellfire features some of the liveliest characters that one is apt to meet in a contemporary novel. Vividly described . . . Meno’s passionate new voice makes him a writer to watch.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Extremely vivid . . . Any number of novels have been written about unhappy childhoods and bizarre families, but this one surpasses many.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“The power is in the writing. Mr. Meno is a superb craftsman.”
—Hubert Selby, Jr.
Description
Read “Disappears,” Joe Meno’s contribution to Akashic’s Mondays Are Murder series.
Joe Meno answered 16 questions for Akashic’s Literary Lions feature. Read his answers here.
An excerpt of the digital edition of Tender as Hellfire is available for free download as part of Akashic’s Joe Meno Digit.
Long before he established himself as an indie-publishing sensation with his hit novels Office Girl, How the Hula Girl Sings, Hairstyles of the Damned and The Boy Detective Fails, Joe Meno brought out his debut novel, Tender As Hellfire, with St. Martin’s Press. Here, with a re-edited paperback edition, Meno limns a near-fantastical world of trailer park floozies, broken-down ’76 Impalas, lost glass eyes, and the daily experiences of two boys trying to make sense of their random, sharp lives.
Dough and Pill are brothers bound by more than blood. The anguish of their past, the terror of their present, and the uncertainty of their future all underscore the only truth that is within their grasp: each other. For beneath the cruel surface of their trailer park community lies a menagerie of odd characters, each one strange yet somehow beautiful. Surrounded by the strange and displaced, Dough and Pill must navigate through a world of constant pain and confusion.
Finding beauty in unexpected places and maintaining a reverence for hard-won scars, these two brothers learn, finally, that even broken things can be perfect.
- Subjects: Literary Fiction
- Tags: Chicago, Joe Meno
Book Details
Author
JOE MENO is a fiction writer and journalist who lives in Chicago. He is the winner of the Nelson Algren Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Great Lakes Book Award, and was a finalist for the Story Prize. He is the best-selling author of nine novels and two short story collections, including Marvel and a Wonder, Hairstyles of the Damned, and The Boy Detective Fails. His nonfiction book on US asylum, Between Everything and Nothing, was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and one of Kirkus Reviews’s Best Books of the Year. Meno is a professor in the School of Communication and Culture at Columbia College Chicago. Quiet City is his latest work.