Beautiful_children_bock
2010 Nominated

Beautiful Children

artwork-image

ABOUT
THE BOOK

One Saturday night in Las Vegas, twelve-year-old Newell Ewing goes out with a friend and doesn’t come home. As the boy’s distraught parents navigate the mystery of what’s become of their son, the circumstances surrounding Newell’s vanishing and other events on that same night reverberate through the lives of seemingly disconnected strangers: a comic book illustrator in town for a weekend of debauchery; a painfully shy and possibly disturbed young artist; a stripper who imagines moments from her life as if they were movie scenes; a bubbly teenage wiccan anarchist; a dangerous and scheming gutter punk; a band of misfit runaways. These “urban nomads,” each with a past to hide and a pain to nurture, search for salvation as they barrel toward destruction, weaving their way through a neon underworld of sex, drugs, and the spinning wheels of chance.

ABOUT
THE AUTHOR Charles
Bock

Charles Bock is the author of the novel Beautiful Children, which was a New York Times bestseller and Notable Book, and which won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Harper’s, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and Slate, as well as in numerous anthologies. He lives with his wife, Leslie Jamison, and his daughter in New York City.

Charles Bock is the author of the novel Beautiful Children, which was a New York Times bestseller and Notable Book, and which won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Harper’s, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and Slate, as well as in numerous anthologies. He lives with his wife, Leslie Jamison, and his daughter in New York City.

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NOMINATING LIBRARY COMMENTS

The author finds poetry in the life of the characters on the fringes of society and takes the reader down a road that could have been very exploitative or played strictly for laughs but ends up being tragically beautiful.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Country
United States
Original Language
English
Author
Publisher
Random House Inc.

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