Amateur Barbarians

Informationen zum Autor Robert Cohen is the author of three previous novels, The Organ Builder, The Here and Now, and Inspired Sleep, and a collection of short stories . Winner of a Lila Atcheston Wallace - Reader's Digest Writers Award, the Ribalow Prize, The Pushcart Prize, and a Whiting Award, he has published short fiction in a variety of publications -- including Harpers, GQ, The Paris Review and Ploughshares. He has taught at the Iowa Writers Workshop, Harvard University, and Middlebury College. He lives in Vermont. Klappentext Acclaimed, award-winning novelist Robert Cohen delivers a bold, provocative exploration of the panic of midlife, following two men plateaued on either side of their forties and the unexpected consequences of changing course. Teddy Hastings is a New England middle school principal desperate for transcendence. Unmoored by his brother’s death and a health scare of his own, he tries to broaden his ordinary life and winds up unemployed and on the wrong side of the law. Meanwhile, Oren Pierce, a perpetual grad student from New York, abandons, somewhat to his own surprise, his search for the extraordinary and begins settling into the humble existence that Teddy seeks to escape. What comforts Oren alarms Teddy, and their paths overlap as Teddy’s quest for the unknown and unfamiliar experience takes him on a rash trip to Africa, leaving Oren to assume the trappings of his life, including Teddy’s wife Gail. Amateur Barbarians showcases a writer at the peak of his powers, tracing domestic ambivalence, the comic perils of introspection and desire, and the terror of an unlived life with Cohen’s signature wit and uncanny perception, proving yet again why he was touted by The New York Times Book Review as the “heir to Saul Bellow and Philip Roth.” Leseprobe 1 Down Time T eddy Hastings hopped down from his treadmill after burning off the usual impressive quotas of time, mass, and distance, and reached for his bottle of purified water. If there was one thing he was good at it was running in place. Outside, the woods were dark along Montcalm Road. Sleet, like an animal scrabbling for entry, tapped against the panes. The water he drained in one gulp. It did not appease his thirst. To stretch out his tendons he leaned hard against the wall with both hands splayed before him, like a man holding back—or welcoming—a flood. His biceps bulged, his triceps trembled. He was a big, keg-chested man with a long list of aggrievements; even on a good day it took forever to get loose. And this was not a good day. His torso felt dense, congested; his hamstrings were knotted tight. Somewhere in the meat of his abdomen, beneath the pale, softening bulge, a cramp had clenched up like a fist. Older people, Teddy knew, were susceptible to such things, to intermittent attacks of localized pain, and though he didn’t like to think of himself as an older person, maybe now that time had come. Fortunately he didn’t mind a little pain now and then. In fact he welcomed it, as an employee welcomes a performance review, or a home team welcomes a formidable adversary: because without it nothing would be tested or advanced. This was why he’d converted the basement that summer, after his dreary little tussle with the authorities. Why he’d taken up the hammer and power saw, plastered and sanded and paneled the walls, tacked down the carpet, plexiglassed the windows and bolstered the frames. At his age you required some insulation in your life; you couldn’t just lie down in the basement and freeze. Above him the house lay quiet, submissive. He could feel its weight poised atop his shoulders. Yet another dumbbell to lift. Dutifully, as if in obeisance to some cranky, intemperate god who oversaw his labors, Teddy sank to his knees and began to push himsel...

Product details

• Authors: Robert Cohen
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 02.03.2013
• EAN: 9781439182680
• ISBN: 978-1-4391-8268-0
• No. of pages: 416
• Dimensions: 152 mm x 235 mm x 32 mm
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature