Tinkers
By Paul Harding
(Bellevue Literary Press, Paperback, 9781934137123, 192pp.)
Publication Date: January 2009
Other Editions of This Title: Paperback, Hardcover
Categories: Literary
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Selected by Indie Booksellers for the January 2009 Indie Next ListPulitzer Prize
American Library Association Notable Book
PEN / Robert Bingham Fellowship for Writers Award
“In Paul Harding’s stunning first novel, we find what readers, writers and reviewers live for.”—San Francisco Chronicle
“There are few perfect debut American novels. Walter Percy’s The Moviegoer and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird come to mind. So does Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping. To this list ought to be added Paul Harding’s devastating first book, Tinkers. . . . Harding has written a masterpiece.” —John Freeman, National Public Radio
“Tinkers is truly remarkable. It achieves and sustains a unique fusion of language and perception. Its fine touch plays over the textured richnesses of very modest lives, evoking again and again a frisson of deep recognition, a sense of primal encounter with the brilliant, elusive world of the senses. It confers on the reader the best privilege fiction can afford, the illusion of ghostly proximity to other human souls.” —Marilynne Robinson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Home, Gilead, and Housekeeping
“[Tinkers is] a novel that you’ll want to savor. . . . I found reading it to be an incredibly moving experience.” —Nancy Pearl
An old man lies dying. Propped up in his living room and surrounded by his children and grandchildren, George Washington Crosby drifts in and out of consciousness, back to the wonder and pain of his impoverished childhood in Maine. As the clock repairer’s time winds down, his memories intertwine with those of his father, an epileptic, itinerant peddler and his grandfather, a Methodist preacher beset by madness. At once heartbreaking and life affirming, Tinkers is an elegiac meditation on love, loss, illness, faith, and the fierce beauty of nature.
Paul Harding is the author of Tinkers, winner of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize. He graduated from the University of Massachusetts and Iowa Writers’ Workshop, was a drummer for the band Cold Water Flat, and has taught writing at Harvard and the University of Iowa. A 2010 Guggenheim fellow and PEN / Robert Bingham Fellowship for Writers Award recipient, Harding lives near Boston with his wife and two sons.
Paul Harding's publisher, the tiny Bellevue Literary Press, published only a few thousand copies of his first novel, Tinkers. Expectations were low. Then it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. More at NPR.org
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