Atticus Lish: Atticus Lish lives in New York.
*Winner of the 2015 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction*
*Winner of the New York City Book Award for Fiction*
*Finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Fiction*
*Winner of Brooklyn Public Library Eagles Literary Prize for
Fiction*
*Winner of the 2014 Carla Furstenberg Cohen Prize for Fiction*
*Winner of Word Riot's 2015 Paula Anderson Book Award* New York
Times Best of 2014
Wall Street Journal's Best of 2014
Vanity Fair's Best of 2014
Publishers Weekly's Best of 2014
BuzzFeed's Best of 2014
New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2015 The finest and most
unsentimental love story of the new decade. -The New York Times
Preparation for the Next Life is dizzying in its ambition and
exhilarating in its triumph. -The New York Times Book Review As
bold and urgent a love story as you'll read this year. -Wall Street
Journal Preparation for the Next Life, by Atticus Lish, is an
astounding first novel about a world so large there is, sometimes,
nowhere to go; a world so small the people in it, sometimes, get
lost. The book has the boundless, epic exhilaration you expect to
find only in a writer as mighty as, say, Walt Whitman. -The New
York Review of Books Lovely and soft, tragic and cutting . . .
maybe the most surprising novel of the year, for the author's
sudden, astounding appearance on the scene, yes, but more for the
temporal details matched succeeded by glowing tenderness. -Vanity
Fair A bare-knuckled tale about two lost souls, -Oprah.com A
sledgehammer to the American dream. -Kirkus Reviews One of the most
acclaimed debut novelists of the year. -New York Observer This
novel is nothing less than a triumph, worthy of every heroic
adjective a critic could throw. It is a reminder, plain and simple,
of what fiction is for. -Financial Times Atticus Lish writes with
beauty, striking attention to detail, and painful honesty about
life on the margins of America -- about the people we don't see,
the places we don't go. -BuzzFeed "Not since Charles Frazier's Cold
Mountain have such arduously yearning treks been made through
maddening, heartbreaking obstructions in the name of love." - New
York Journal of Books In the twenty-first-century United States,
oppression is disorganized, random and proceeds largely through
neglect. Still, it crushes plenty of people. The wretched of the
earth are here among us, for the most part silenced--but with this
novel, Lish has given them an unmistakable voice. -The Nation
Preparation for the Next Life isn't just the best novel I've read
this year, it may be be the best novel I've read, ever. I've seen
the book appearing on quite a few "best of" lists recently--well
deserved. And I am now a believer: this book should be in the
conversation for a national prize. -Publishers Weekly, Best of 2014
The narrative in Preparation for the Next Life is full of movement,
and the prose compulsively conveys the sensory impressions and
social interactions of life in the city. As well as being a raw and
sharply rendered love story, this is a stark portrayal of
immigration, an autopsy of the degradations of the Bush years, and
as ambitious and impressive a first novel as you could hope to
find. -The Irish Times Atticus Lish's Preparation for the Next
Life, published this month, is the first novel I've read in ages
that takes New York as seriously -- with as much fortified realism
-- as Dubliners takes Dublin -Flavorwire So much of American
fiction has become playful, cynical and evasive. 'Preparation for
the Next Life' is the strong antidote to such inconsequentialities.
Powerfully realistic, with a solemn, muscular lyricism, this is a
very, very good book -Joy Williams [Preparation for the Next Life]
is devastatingly good. My heart was a different size by the time I
finished: swollen from the terrible beating it took, but also, I
think, permanently augmented.' -Ned Beauman The 'next life' of
Atticus Lish's novel is the one you have to die to know. It's also
the next civilian life of a soldier ravaged by three tours in Iraq,
and the dodgy life of an immigrant in the city's sleepless
boroughs. The work is violent, swift, and gloriously descriptive.
It is love story and lament, a haunting record of unraveling lives.
Lish says starkly and with enormous power: the spirit prevails
until it doesn't. A stunning debut. -Noy Holland, author of Swim
for the Little One First An illegal Chinese immigrant meets a
broken American warrior, and the great love story of the 21st
century begins. The intersection of their paths seems inevitable,
irrevocable. Their story: tender, violent, terrible, and beautiful.
Atticus Lish's prose, lyrical and taut, sentences as exact and
indisputable as chemical formulas, is trance-like, evangelical in
its ability to convert and convince its reader. Preparation for the
Next Life is that rare novel that grabs you by the shirt and slaps
you hard in the face. Look, it says. It isn't pretty. Turn away at
your own risk. In case you haven't noticed, the American Dream has
become a nightmare. Atticus Lish has your wake up call. He has
created a new prototype of the hero, and her journey provides us
with a devastating perspective on the promised land of the post
9/11 U.S., where being detained is a rite of passage and the
banality of violence is simply part of the pre-apocalyptic
landscape. -Christopher Kennedy, author of Ennui Prophet Atticus
Lish has written the most relevant, and beautiful, novel of the
year. -Scott McClanahan, author of Crapalachia and Hill William
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