Karr - The Liars Club: a memoir

THE LIARS CLUB

When it was first published in 1995, The Liars Club took the world by storm and raised the art of the memoir to an entirely new level, bringing about a dramatic revival of the form. Karrs comic childhood in an east Texas oil town brings us characters as darkly hilarious as any of J. D. Salingersa hard-drinking daddy, a sister who can talk down the sheriff at age twelve, and an oft-married mother whose accumulated secrets threaten to destroy them all.

Now in a stunning twentieth-anniversary Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition, with a new foreword by Lena Dunhama creative game-changer in her own rightthis unsentimental and profoundly moving account of an apocalyptic childhood is as funny, lively, and un-put-downable (USA Today) today as it ever was.

The essential American story... A great pleasure to read.

The Washington Post Book World

Astonishing... one of the most dazzling and moving memoirs to come along in years... [Karrs] most powerful tool is her language, which she wields with the virtuosity of both a lyric poet and an earthy, down-home Texan. Its a wonderfully unsentimental vision.

The New York Times

This is what the memoir is supposed to be.

Stephen King, Entertainment Weekly

This book is so good I thought about sending it out for a backup opinion.... Its like finding Beethoven in Hoboken. To have a poets precision of language and a poets insight into people applied to one of the roughest, toughest, ugliest places in America is an astonishing event.

Molly Ivins, The Nation

Overflows with sparkling wit and humor... Truth beats powerfully at the heart of this dazzling memoir.

San Francisco Chronicle

Karr lovingly retells [her parents] best lies and drunken extravagances with an ear for bar-stool phraseology and a winking eye for image. The revelations continue to the final page, with a misleading carelessness as seductive as any world-class liars.

The New Yorker

Karr has drawn black gold from the [Texan] mud.

Texas Monthly

Mary Karrs God-awful childhood has a calamitous appeal. The choice in the book is between howling misery and howling laughter, and the reader veers toward laughter. Karr has survived to write a drop-dead reply to the question, Ma, what was it like when you were a little girl?

Time

This is one hell of a story, and [Karr] tells it vividly.... There is no question that this uninhibited and unsettlingly tough-talking book is driven by love.

Chicago Tribune

Prop your cowboy boots on the porch rail, open a cold longneck and listen to the voice of a born storyteller.... Captivating, hilarious and heartfelt.

Los Angeles Times

With language as hotly peppered as East Texas cuisine, Karr dishes up a main course of hard times, with wit on the side.... It keeps you coming back for more.

The Philadelphia Inquirer

Superb... unflinching and hilarious. The Liars Club has the smack-you-in-the-face freshness that marks books that endure.

Houston Chronicle

Captivating... Shes figured out a way to make every reader live through what no child should ever have to endure.

Newsweek

A dazzling, devastating memoir... Recounting one apocalyptic event after another, Karrs voice never falters or rings false.

Vogue

Nine-millimeter humor, gothic wit, and a stunning clarity of memory within a poets vision.

The Boston Sunday Globe

Elegaic and searching... Her toughness of spirit, her poetry, her language, her very voice are the agents of rebirth in this difficult, hard-earned journey.

The New York Times Book Review

Lovely and harrowing... Karr is long on wit and short on sentiment, and her fierce love for these people who are her family hold the readers pity at bay. The Liars Club is surely one of the best books of this, or any, year.

The Dallas Morning News

An astonishing memoir of a ferociously loving and dysfunctional family.

People

A childhood remembered without sentimentality, written with a songwriters ear for cadence, dialogue, place and time. Karr stops your heart in less than five pages.... The reader wont forget this soon.

The Denver Post

The nonfiction equivalent of a Raymond Carver short story.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer

One of the very best books to be published this year, and quite possibly the best account of childhood to appear in some time.

The Milwaukee Journa

A very funny and strangely hopeful book... The story was so engrossing, so painful, so darkly comic that I couldnt put it down until my head started nodding onto my shoulder. It became more stunning with every page.

San Antonio Express News

Bold, blunt, and cinematic... nothing short of superb.

Entertainment Weekly

A fierce, funny, and splendid memoir.

The Voice Literary Supplement

An excellent book... It will endure and entrance readers for generations.

Fort Worth Star-Telegram

PENGUIN CLASSICS DELUXE EDITION

THE LIARS CLUB

MARY KARR kick-started a memoir revolution with The Liars Club, which was a New York Times bestseller for over a year, a best book of the year for The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, People, and Time, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the winner of prizes from PEN and the Texas Institute of Letters. Karr has won the Whiting Award, Radcliffes Bunting Fellowship, and Pushcart Prizes for both verse and essays, and she has been a Guggenheim Fellow in poetry. Her other bestselling books include The Art of Memoir, the memoirs Lit and Cherry, and the poetry collections Sinners Welcome, Viper Rum, The Devils Tour, and Abacus. The Peck Professor of Literature at Syracuse University, Karr lives in New York City.

LENA DUNHAM is the creator of the critically acclaimed HBO series Girls and the author of the New York Times bestselling essay collection Not That Kind of Girl. A frequent contributor to The New Yorker, she lives in Brooklyn and Los Angeles.

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First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Books USA Inc. 1995

Published in Penguin Books 1996

Edition with an introduction by Mary Karr published 2005

This edition with a foreword by Lena Dunham published 2015

Copyright 1995, 2005 by Mary Karr

Foreword copyright 2015 by Lena Dunham

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