Burning Boy The Life and Work of Stephen Crane

Paul Auster

NARRATIVE. SEIX BARRAL, 2021. 1040 PAGES.

Booker Prize-shortlisted and New York Times bestselling author Paul Auster's comprehensive, landmark biography of the great American writer Stephen Crane.

With Burning Boy, celebrated novelist Paul Auster tells the extraordinary story of Stephen Crane, best known as the author of The Red Badge of Courage, who transformed American literature through an avalanche of original short stories, novellas, poems, journalism, and war reportage before his life was cut short by tuberculosis at age twenty-eight.

Auster's probing account of this singular life tracks Crane as he rebounds from one perilous situation to the next: A controversial article written at twenty disrupts the course of the 1892 presidential campaign, a public battle with the New York police department over the false arrest of a prostitute effectively exiles him from the city, a star-crossed love affair with an unhappily married uptown girl tortures him, a common-law marriage to the proprietress of Jacksonville's most elegant bawdyhouse endures, a shipwreck results in his near drowning, he withstands enemy fire to send dispatches from the Spanish-American War, and then he relocates to England, where Joseph Conrad becomes his closest friend and Henry James weeps over his tragic, early death.

In Burning Boy, Auster not only puts forth an immersive read about an unforgettable life but also, casting a dazzled eye on Crane's astonishing originality and productivity, provides uniquely knowing insight into Crane's creative processes to produce the rarest of reading experiences-the dramatic biography of a brilliant writer as only another literary master could tell it.

 

«Incandescent. . . Auster writes with such enrapturing vibrancy, expertise, and empathy that his biography serves as an intensive course in attentive, inquisitive reading as well as a thrillingly insightful and resonant portrait of a young artist.»

Booklist

 

«Beguiling. . . . Auster's sprawling narrative combines punchy writing and shrewd analysis with an exuberant passion for his subject. The result is a definitive biography of a great writer.»

Publishers Weekly

 

«Auster's in-depth exploration of major works like Red Badge is engrossing, as are most of his renderings of Crane's life experiences. . . . Essential.»
Kirkus Reviews

 

«Paul Auster calls Stephen Crane 'The Burning Boy, ' and Crane's passions burn incandescently in this exceptional biography of a prodigy whose life was cut tragically short. It represents a rare literary match--a visceral affinity--between a biographer and a subject, both masters of modern fiction. And one reads it in the same white heat.»

Judith Thurman, National Book Award-winning author of Isak Dinesenand Secrets of the Flesh

 

PUBLISHED BY: Spanish SEIX BARRAL | Portuguese ASA

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