I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place

Availability:
Ebook in EPUB format. Available for immediate download after we receive your order

DRM:
Watermark

Publication Year:
2013

ISBN-13: 9780547724775

<DIV><B>&ldquo;Some books celebrate the human condition; others commiserate with us. This memoir does both.&rdquo; &mdash;Helen Oyeyemi, NPR</B><BR /><BR /> This spellbinding memoir by the National Book Award&ndash;nominated author of <I>The Bird Artist</I> begins with a portrait, both harrowing and hilarious, of a midwestern boy&rsquo;s summer working in a bookmobile, under the shadow of his grifter father and the erotic tutelage of his brother&rsquo;s girlfriend. Howard Norman&rsquo;s life story continues in places as far-flung as the Arctic, where he spends part of a decade as a translator of Inuit tales&mdash;including the story of a soapstone carver turned into a goose whose migration-time lament is &ldquo;I hate to leave this beautiful place&rdquo;&mdash;and in his beloved Point Reyes, California, as a student of birds.<BR /> &#160;<BR /> Years later, Norman and his wife lend their Washington, DC, home to a poet and her young son, and a subsequent murder-suicide in the house has a profound effect on them. In this &ldquo;unexpectedly arresting&rdquo; memoir, life&rsquo;s unpredictable strangeness is fashioned into a creative and redemptive story (<I>The New York Times Book Review</I>).<BR /> &#160;<BR /> &ldquo;Norman uses the tight focus of geography to describe five unsettling periods of his life, each separated by time and subtle shifts in his narrative voice.&#160;.&#160;.&#160;. The originality of his telling here is as surprising as ever.&rdquo; &mdash;<I>The Washington Post</I><BR /> &#160;<BR /> &ldquo;These stories almost seem like tall tales themselves, but Norman renders them with a journalistic attention to detail. Amidst these bizarre experiences, he finds solace through the places he&rsquo;s lived and their quirky inhabitants, human and avian.&rdquo; &mdash;<I>The New Yorker</I></DIV>