Downtown Owl

Zusatztext "It's tempting to compare this novel with Sherwood Anderson's classic portrait of small-town American life! Winesburg! Ohio . But no one in Winesburg listened to Ozzy Osbourne. And Klosterman is much funnier than Anderson." -- The Washington Post Informationen zum Autor Chuck Klosterman is the New York Times-bestselling author of seven other books, including The Visible Man; Eating the Dinosaur; and Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs. His debut book, Fargo Rock City, was a winner of the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award. Klosterman is the Ethicist for The New York Times Magazine, and writes regularly about sports and popular culture for Grantland.com. He has also written for GQ, Esquire, Spin, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The A.V. Club, and The Believer. Klappentext Now a major film! New York Times bestselling author and “one of America’s top cultural critics” ( Entertainment Weekly ) Chuck Klosterman’s debut novel brilliantly captures the charm and dread of small-town life. Somewhere in rural North Dakota, there is a fictional town called Owl. They don’t have cable. They don’t really have pop culture, but they do have grain prices and alcoholism. People work hard and then they die. But that’s not nearly as awful as it sounds; in fact, sometimes it’s perfect. Mitch Hrlicka lives in Owl. He plays high school football and worries about his weirdness, or lack thereof. Julia Rabia just moved to Owl. A history teacher, she gets free booze and falls in love with a self-loathing bison farmer. Widower and local conversationalist Horace Jones has resided in Owl for seventy-three years. They all know each other completely, except that they’ve never met. But when a deadly blizzard—based on an actual storm that occurred in 1984—hits the area, their lives are derailed in unexpected and powerful ways. An unpretentious, darkly comedic story of how it feels to exist in a community where local mythology and violent reality are pretty much the same thing, Downtown Owl is “a satisfying character study and strikes a perfect balance between the funny and the profound” ( Publishers Weekly ). "It's tempting to compare this novel with Sherwood Anderson's classic portrait of small-town American life, "Winesburg, Ohio". But no one in Winesburg listened to Ozzy Osbourne. And Klosterman is much funnier than Anderson." -- "The Washington Post" Downtown Owl AUGUST 15, 1983 (Mitch) When Mitch Hrlicka heard that his high school football coach had gotten another teenage girl pregnant, he was forty bushels beyond bamboozled. He could not understand what so many females saw in Mr. Laidlaw. He was inhumane, and also sarcastic. Whenever Mitch made the slightest mental error, Laidlaw would rhetorically scream, “Vanna? Vanna? Are you drowsy, Vanna? Wake up! You can sleep when you are dead, Vanna!” Mr. Laidlaw seemed unnaturally proud that he had nicknamed Mitch “Vanna White” last winter, solely based on one semifunny joke about how the surname “Hrlicka” needed more vowels. Mitch did not mind when other kids called him Vanna, because almost everyone he knew had a nickname; as far as he could tell, there was nothing remotely humiliating about being called “Vanna,” assuming everyone understood that the name had been assigned arbitrarily. It symbolized nothing. But Mitch hated when John Laidlaw called him “Vanna,” because Laidlaw assumed it was humiliating. And that, clearly, was his goal. Christ, it was humid. When Mitch and his teenage associates had practiced that morning at 7:30 a.m., it was almost cool; the ground had been wet with dew and the clouds hovered fourteen feet off the ground. But now—eleven hours later—the sun was burning and falling like the Hindenburg. The air was damp wool. Mitch limped toward the practice field for the evening’...

Produktdetails

• Autoren: Chuck Klosterman
• Verlag: Scribner USA
• Sprache: Englisch
• Produktform: Taschenbuch
• Erschienen: 17.09.2009
• EAN: 9781416544197
• ISBN: 978-1-4165-4419-7
• Abmessung: 140 mm x 213 mm x 18 mm
• Thema: Belletristik > Erzählende Literatur