Beautiful Children, Charles Bock
Beautiful Children, Charles Bock
List: $20.00 | Sale: $14.00
Club: $10.00

Beautiful Children

Author: Charles Bock

Narrator: Mark Deakins

Abridged: 9 hr 5 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 01/22/2008


Synopsis

The New York Times bestseller by the author of the forthcoming novel Alice & Oliver | Winner of the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters | A New York Times Notable Book
 
“One word: bravo.”—The New York Times Book Review
 
“Truly powerful . . . Beautiful Children dazzles its readers on almost every page. . . . [Charles Bock] knows how to tug at your heart, and he knows how to make you laugh out loud, often on the same page, sometimes in the same sentence.”—Newsweek

One Saturday night in Las Vegas, twelve-year-old Newell Ewing goes out with a friend and doesn’t come home. In the aftermath of his disappearance, his mother, Lorraine, makes daily pilgrimages to her son’s room and tortures herself with memories. Equally distraught, the boy’s father, Lincoln, finds himself wanting to comfort his wife even as he yearns for solace, a loving touch, any kind of intimacy.

As the Ewings 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. The people of Beautiful Children are “urban nomads,” each with a past to hide and a pain to nurture, every one of them searching for salvation and barreling toward destruction, weaving their way through a neon underworld of sex, drugs, and the spinning wheels of chance.

In this masterly debut novel, Charles Bock mixes incandescent prose with devious humor to capture Las Vegas with unprecedented scope and nuance and to provide a glimpse into a microcosm of modern America. Beautiful Children is an odyssey of heartache and redemption heralding the arrival of a major new writer.

Praise for Beautiful Children
 
“Exceptional . . . This novel deserves to be read more than once because of the extraordinary importance of its subject matter.”—The Washington Post Book World
 
“Magnificent . . . a hugely ambitious novel that succeeds . . . Beautiful Children manages to feel completely of its moment while remaining unaffected by literary trends. . . . Charles Bock is the real thing.”—The New Republic
 
“A wildly satisfying and disturbing literary journey, led by an author of blazing talent.”—The Dallas Morning News
 
“Wholly original—dirty, fast, and hypnotic. The sentences flicker and skip and whirl.”—Esquire
 
“An anxious, angry, honest first novel filled with compassion and clarity . . . The language has a rhythm wholly its own—at moments it is stunning, near genius.”—A. M. Homes
 
“From start to finish, Bock never stops tantalizing the reader.”—San Francisco Chronicle
 
“Rich and compelling . . . captures the hallucinogenic setting like a fever dream.”—Los Angeles Times

About The Author

Charles Bock was born in Las Vegas, Nevada. He has an MFA from Bennington College and has received fellowships from Yaddo, UCross, and the Vermont Studio Center. He lives in New York City.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Melissa on February 18, 2008

To get through a book where the "punk" characters say things like "cool beans" and "he's an Urkel" and "oh snap!"; where the strippers have hearts of gold and the former strippers grow up to be the best mothers; where the author unironically writes sentences like "the world was a pair of successfull......more

Goodreads review by Oriana on May 06, 2013

This wasn't bad or anything, but it was fairly unsatisfying, overall. It's a loosely connected story of a handful of characters with pretty messy lives, all fucking up and being fucked up in Las Vegas. It's definitely not a Swingers type of Las Vegas; it's the grittier, grimier, non-touristy side, w......more

Goodreads review by George on April 04, 2008

I first heard about this book in a Times profile of Bock. A big deal was made of how Charles Bock took 11 years to write this novel. This fact stuck with me throughout reading the book, as so much of it seems to have been so crafted and re-crafted to the point of being overwritten. There are referen......more

Goodreads review by Michael on February 26, 2008

I came to Beautiful Children in between reading two Cormac McCarthy novels, Blood Meridian and The Road. And while Bock [full disclosure: I know him] and McCarthy are as different as two writers can be, they have this in common: Their characters inhabit an America that devours its children. In fact,......more

Goodreads review by Carsten on July 18, 2008

I am still reading this book, but so far i am quite impressed. i really love the character development and the language. I saw some reviews that didn't like the book, that couldn't find the las vegas in the novel, but while i think there is quite a bit about las vegas in the story the city is not th......more


Quotes

“One word: bravo.”The New York Times Book Review
 
“Truly powerful . . . Beautiful Children dazzles its readers on almost every page. . . . [Charles Bock] knows how to tug at your heart, and he knows how to make you laugh out loud, often on the same page, sometimes in the same sentence.”Newsweek
 
“Exceptional . . . This novel deserves to be read more than once because of the extraordinary importance of its subject matter.”The Washington Post Book World
 
“Magnificent . . . a hugely ambitious novel that succeeds . . . Beautiful Children manages to feel completely of its moment while remaining unaffected by literary trends. . . . Charles Bock is the real thing.”The New Republic
 
“A wildly satisfying and disturbing literary journey, led by an author of blazing talent.”The Dallas Morning News
 
“Wholly original—dirty, fast, and hypnotic. The sentences flicker and skip and whirl.”Esquire
 
“An anxious, angry, honest first novel filled with compassion and clarity . . . The language has a rhythm wholly its own—at moments it is stunning, near genius.”—A. M. Homes
 
“From start to finish, Bock never stops tantalizing the reader.”San Francisco Chronicle
 
“Rich and compelling . . . captures the hallucinogenic setting like a fever dream.”Los Angeles Times