Mary Karr - The Liars Club: A Memoir

AN AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION NOTABLE BOOK

Rave reviews for Mary Karr and The Liars Club

This book is so good I thought about sending it out for a back-up opinionits 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

9mm humor, gothic wit and a stunning clarity of memory within a poets vision. Karrs unerring scrutiny of her childhood delivers a story confoundingly real.

The Boston Sunday Globe

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

San Francisco Chronicle

Elegiac and searchingher toughness of spirit, her poetry, her language, her very voice are the agents of rebirth on this difficult, hard-earned journey.

The New York Times Book Review

A dazzling, devastating memoir. She paints an unsparing portrait of her struggle through a fractured childhood. Recounting one apocalyptic event after another, Karrs voice never falters or rings false.

Vogue

Bold, blunt, and cinematicnothing short of superb.

Entertainment Weekly

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

Houston Chronicle

A brave, brilliant offering to the world

Word

An astonishing memoir of a ferociously loving and dysfunctional familyKarr uses the rich cadence of the region and poetic images to shape her wrenching story.

People

From painful matters, Mary Karr has fashioned a book of great warmth and humor, honest to the bone. The Liars Club is the vivid recollection of a childhood no one would have chosen, but such is the ferocity of Karrs love for her family, and the gritty eloquence of her voice, that we enter her world with pleasure and leave it with regret.

Tobias Wolff, author of This Boys Life

The Liars Club shimmers with great truths, surely hard-won and well worth knowing. Mary Karr has made a fearless, poignant and often hilarious foray into the crazy darkness of an American childhood, and brought back a brilliant memoir of innocence and violence, loss and hope. This is a book of genuine humanity.

Bradford Morrow, author of Trinity Fields

The Liars Club promises to catapult Karr to the exalted level of New American Voice. From the fabric of a troubled and traumatic childhood, she has crafted a tale that resonates with the universal uncertainty of childhoodHer poetic touch illuminates a thousand sentences. Karr has drawn black gold from the [Texan] mud.

Texas Monthly

Roll over in the pure luxury of a good book, sucking this story up through the straw of clean-to-the-bone writing. Karrs is a childhood remembered without sentimentality, written with a songwriters ear for cadence, dialogue, place and time. Karr stops your heart in less than five pagesthe reader wont forget this soon.

The Denver Post

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

Chicago Tribune

A fierce, funny, and splendid memoir.it is Karrs uncompromising drive toward honesty, clarity and the exposing of secrets that drives the book.

The Voice Literary Supplement

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

Raucous and gritty and keening and wild, Mary Karrs memoir of growing up in a Texas oil town is long on suspense and short on sentiment. Heres a loss of innocence in which the schoolyard rape gets little more than a footnote. Karr faces it down as she does cancer, madness, alcoholism and a vicious dogwith humor and a scrappy genius for survival.

Kathryn Harrison, author of Poison

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

The Philadelphia Inquirer

A very funny and strangely hopeful bookthe 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

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

Los Angeles Times

Lovely and harrowingMary 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

Karr writes in captivating stylelike a great Liars Club tale, her narrative meanders through tangents that are sometimes more entertaining than the point shes getting to. Shes figured out a way to make every reader live through what no child should ever have to endure.

Newsweek

The nonfiction equivalent of a Raymond Carver short story.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer

A dark, sassy, disturbing taleits the story of an unconventional, spirited, childhood, and of parents whose love for their children was fierce and enduring, but desperately flawed.

St. Petersburg Times

Some childhoods are so pitiable you have to either laugh or cryKarrs memoir succeeds in taking the reader to both extremes. With a sure hand, she digs deep into her youth and hits black gold.

Kirkus Reviews

A warning should be posted on this book: May be hard to put down and get out of your mind.

The Columbus Press Dispatch

This is an excellent bookit will endure and entrance readers for generations.

Fort Worth Star-Telegram

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 Journal

Breathtaking clarity and compassion[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 that redeems the past even as it recaptures it on paper.

Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

PENGUIN BOOKS

THE LIARS CLUB

Mary Karrs three volumes of poetry are Viper Rum, The Devils Tour, and Abacus. She has won Pushcart Prizes for both poetry and essays, and her work appears in such magazines as The New Yorker, Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, Granta, Parnassus, Vogue, and American Poetry Review. The Liars Club won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the best first nonfiction, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was given the Texas Institute of Letters Prize for best nonfiction. The sequel, Cherry, is also available from Penguin. Her grants include the prestigious Whiting Writers Award and the Bunting Fellowship from Radcliffe College. A Guggenheim Fellow in poetry, Karr is currently Jesse Truedell Peck Professor of Literature at Syracuse University, and lives in New York City.

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