The Car Thief, Theodore Weesner
The Car Thief, Theodore Weesner
List: $22.95 | Sale: $16.07
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The Car Thief

Author: Theodore Weesner

Narrator: Richard Powers

Unabridged: 12 hr 32 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 08/15/2013

Synopsis

Described as "one of the best coming-of-age novels of the twentieth century," Theodore Weesner's modern American classic is now on audio!It's 1959. Sixteen-year-old Alex Housman has just stolen his fourteenth car and frankly doesn't know why. His divorced, working-class father grinds out the night shift at the local Chevy plant in Detroit and looks forward to the flask in his glove compartment and the open bottles of booze in his Flint, Michigan, home. Broke and fighting to survive, Alex and his father face the realities of estrangement, incarceration, and even violence as their lives unfold toward the climactic episode that a New York Times reviewer called "one of the most profoundly powerful in American fiction."In this rich, beautifully crafted story, Weesner has written a transcendent piece of literature in deceptively simple language, painting a powerful portrait of a father and a son otherwise invisible among the mundane, everyday details of life in blue-collar America. It is a true and enduring American classic.

About Theodore Weesner

Theodore Weesner, born in Flint, Michigan, is aptly described as a “writers’ writer” by the larger literary community. His short works have been published in the New Yorker, Esquire, the Saturday Evening Post, the Atlantic, and Best American Short Stories. His novels—including The True Detective, Winning the City, and Harbor Lights—have been published to great critical acclaim in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Harper’s, the Boston Globe, USA Today, the Chicago Tribune, Boston magazine, and the Los Angeles Times, to name a few. He lives and works in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

About Richard Powers

Richard Powers has published thirteen novels. He is a MacArthur Fellow and received the National Book Award. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Overstory, and Bewilderment was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Tony

The Car Thief is about a teen with so much angst, it brought me straight back to high school. Alex Housman is a kid from Flint, Michigan who steals cars but wouldn't be able to tell you why. I can imagine James Dean at his best trying to play this guy's pain, but not quite capturing it. He loves his......more

Goodreads review by Tara

Wow, what an inspiring book! THE CAR THEIF is a beautifully crafted coming of age story. We see the story through Alex Housman’s eyes. A young boy living in a very broken world in the late 1950’s. He lives alone with his alcoholic father. His mother has left and started a new life with a new husband......more

Goodreads review by Mia

This review and more can be read on my blog here: The Muses Circle The whole process of reading and reviewing this book came about in a completely different way. I am used to getting author requests, but this is the first time I've been approached by a publicist. Serena Ainesly, head publicist for Bl......more

Goodreads review by Nancy

This story is a “come to Jesus” moment for anyone who reads it. It tells us of Alex, the son and of Curly, the father. They are together on different planes - the same house, sleeping, eating, living together barely speaking, barely existing most of the time. Mom left with the young brother, Howard,......more

Quotes

“A remarkable, gripping first novel.” Joyce Carol Oates

“One of the great coming-of-age novels of the twentieth century…Ted Weesner’s seminal novel demands a second look for its marvelously rendered young protagonist, the unforgettable Alex Housman; for its courage and wisdom and great good heart.” Jennifer Haigh, New York Times bestselling author

“What The Car Thief is really concerned with emerges between its realistic lines—slowly, delicately, with consummate art. Perhaps Mr. Weesner himself put it best: ‘In my work, I guess I wish for nothing so much as to get close enough to things to feel their heart and warmth and pain, and in that way appreciate them a little more.’ Judging from this book, his wish has been fulfilled…and then some.” New York Times

“Weesner lays out a subtle and complex case study of juvenile delinquency that wrenches the heart. The novel reminds me strongly of the poignant aimlessness of Truffaut’s The 400 Blows. Beneath its quiet surface, The Car Thief—like its protagonist—possesses churning emotions that push up through the prose for resolution. Weesner is definitely a man to watch—and read.” Newsweek

“The Car Thief is a poignant and beautifully written novel, so true and so excruciatingly painful that one can’t read it without feeling the knife’s cruel blade in the heart.” Boston Globe

“A simply marvelous novel. Alex (the protagonist) emerges from it as a kind of blue-collar Holden Caulfield.” Kansas City Star

“Weesner’s perfectly restrained and subtle exploration of the characters’ painful and often difficult emotions caused me to have an intimate and emotional connection to a character and story of such a seemingly distant world. It taught me that even the most personal of stories can be universal and it is with this belief that I have adapted The Car Thief into what I hope will be a film that does some justice to the most beautiful novel that ever broke my heart.” Dara Van Dusen, filmmaker

Awards

  • Amazon Top 100 Book
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