The Liars Club, Mary Karr
The Liars Club, Mary Karr
List: $22.50 | Sale: $15.75
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The Liars' Club
A Memoir

Author: Mary Karr

Narrator: Mary Karr

Unabridged: 14 hr 12 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Penguin Audio

Published: 03/28/2023


Synopsis

“Wickedly funny and always movingly illuminating, thanks to kick-ass storytelling and a poet's ear.” –Oprah.com
 
The New York Times bestselling, hilarious tale of Mary Karr’s hardscrabble Texas childhood that Oprah.com calls the best memoir of a generation.

The Liars’ Club took the world by storm and raised the art of the memoir to an entirely new level, bringing about a dramatic revival of the form. Karr’s comic childhood in an east Texas oil town brings us characters as darkly hilarious as any of J. D. Salinger’s—a hard-drinking daddy, a sister who can talk down the sheriff at age twelve, and an oft-married mother whose accumulated secrets threaten to destroy them all. This unsentimental and profoundly moving account of an apocalyptic childhood is as “funny, lively, and un-put-downable” (USA Today) today as it ever was.

About The Author

Mary Karr kick-started a memoir revolution with The Liars' Club, which was a New York Times bestseller for over a year, a best book of the year for The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, People and Time, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the winner of prizes from PEN and the Texas Institute of Letters. Karr has won the Whiting Award, Radcliffe's Bunting Fellowship, and Pushcart Prizes for both verse and essays, and she has been a Guggenheim Fellow in poetry. Her other bestselling books include The Art of Memoir, the memoirs Lit and Cherry, and the poetry collection Sinners Welcome, Viper Rum, The Devil's Tour, and Abacus. The Peck Professor of Literature at Syracuse University, Karr lives in New York City.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Bryan on April 15, 2013

I don't write a lot of customer reviews. And when I finished this book, I didn't think it needed my review. For one thing, I'm probably the last person in the hemisphere to read it; for another, this book is so good and has been popular for so long that its ratings must be sky high, right? At the ti......more

Goodreads review by Fabian on September 27, 2020

I am confoundingly happy that poets can also be great novelists. (I read very little poetry, dedicating my time to prose almost exclusively.) Better yet, sometimes expert autobiographers. Shares the same bookshelf with Jeanette Walls' also mighty impressive nonfiction autobio "The Glass Castle."......more

Goodreads review by Dorothea on November 02, 2013

The Liars' Club is Mary Karr's memoir of her childhood growing up in a small, east Texas oil town, and was first published in 1995. The thought of how this woman's writing has managed to escape me until two weeks ago is unnerving. I blame all of you, actually, for not telling me about her sooner. Je......more

Goodreads review by Ines on September 20, 2020

Do you want an advice? Read this book in a period of peace of mind because the reading has a disruptive force to make you enter in a highly depressive grey vortex. I am still not able to frame and analyze the impression that this reading has left me, surely Karr's writing is magnificent and the pages......more

Goodreads review by Libros Prestados on June 22, 2018

Aquí la videoreseña: [URL not allowed] Hace varios días que termine la lectura de este libro. Le di un tiempo de reposo para fijar mis idea y dar una opinión más clara, más allá de las primeras emociones, pero sigo sin saber muy bien qué decir. Me he reído muchísimo con este lib......more


Quotes

"The essential American story ... a beauty." —Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post Book World

"Astonishing ... one of the most dazzling and moving memoirs to come along in years." —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"This book is so good I thought about sending it out for a backup opinion...it's like finding Beethoven in Hoboken. To have a poet's precision of language and a poet's insight into people applied to one of the roughest, toughest, ugliest places in America is an astonishing event." —Molly Ivins, The Nation

"9mm humor, gothic wit, and a stunning clarity of memory within a poet's vision.... Karr's unerring scrutiny of her childhood delivers a story confoundingly real." —The Boston Sunday Globe

"Overflows with sparkling wit and humor.... Truth beats powerfully at the heart of this dazzling memoir." —San Francisco Chronicle


Awards

  • PEN/Martha Albrand Award