The Small Backs of Children, Lidia Yuknavitch
The Small Backs of Children, Lidia Yuknavitch
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The Small Backs of Children

Author: Lidia Yuknavitch

Narrator: Amanda Dolan

Unabridged: 5 hr 11 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 07/07/2015


Synopsis

A masterful literary talent explores the treacherous, often violent borders between war and sex, love and art. In a war-torn village in Eastern Europe, an American photographer captures a heart-stopping image: a young girl flying toward the lens, fleeing a fiery explosion that has engulfed her home and family. The image wins acclaim and prizes, becoming an icon for millions and a subject of obsession for one writer, the photographers best friend, who has suffered a devastating tragedy of her own. As the writer plunges into a suicidal depression, her filmmaker husband enlists several friends, including a fearless bisexual poet and ingenious performance artist, to save her by rescuing the unknown girl and bringing her to the United States. And yet, as their plot unfolds, everything we know about the story comes into question: What does the writer really want? Who is controlling the action? And what will happen when these two worldS east and west, real and virtual collide? A fierce, provocative, a deeply affecting novel of both ideas and action that blends the tight construction of Julian Branes TheSense of an Ending with the emotional power of Anthony Marra's A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, Lidia Yuknavitchs The Small Backs of Children is a major step forward from one of our most avidly watched writers.

About Lidia Yuknavitch

Lidia Yuknavitch is the author of the nationally bestselling novel The Small Backs of Children (winner of the 2016 Oregon Book Award's Ken Kesey Award for Fiction and the Reader's Choice Award), the novel Dora: A Headcase, and three books of short fiction. Her widely acclaimed memoir, The Chronology of Water, was a finalist for a PEN Center USA award for creative nonfiction and winner of a PNBA Award and the Oregon Book Award Reader's Choice.

Lidia founded the workshop series Corporeal Writing in Portland Oregon, where she teaches both in person and online. She received her doctorate in Literature from the University of Oregon. She lives in Oregon with her husband, Andy Mingo, and their renaissance man son, Miles. She is a very good swimmer.


Reviews

I loved this book in the beginning. I read an e-galley of this on my kindle and as I often do , I started to highlight passages that stand out for me or that get me in the gut . After a few pages , I realized that I had highlighted more than half of what I had read . The writing was gorgeous. From t......more

This is one of those rare books that I cannot describe, only to say that it hit me at gut level. Sometimes so much so that I had to set it aside, as it had it's way with me. It is a book about artists and their art, but the characters do not have names, simply, the photographer, the painter, etc. Th......more

Goodreads review by Rae

I admired a lot of what Yuknavitch did with this book, the layering of characters, the spinning of plot, but I did not love it. She is a formidable talent on the sentence/image/poetic level, and I could see what she was going for with the focus on the body--violence/sex/love/life/art--but there were......more