The Pugilist at Rest: Stories by Thom Jones
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Overview: Thom Jones, who died in October 2016 at the age of 71, was a high school janitor whose short stories vaunted him into the literary spotlight in the early 1990s. Jones made his literary debut in The New Yorker in 1991. His first collection of short stories, The Pugilist at Rest, was a finalist for the National Book Award and was selected by Publishers Weekly as one of the best books of 1993.
Jones’s stories — whether set in the combat zones of Vietnam or the brittle social and intellectual milieu of an elite New England college, whether recounting the poignant last battles of an alcoholic ex-fighter or the hallucinatory visions of an American wandering lost in Bombay in the aftermath of an epileptic fugue — are fueled by an almost brutal vision of the human condition, in a world without mercy or redemption. Physically battered, soul-sick, and morally exhausted, Jones’s characters are yet unable to concede defeat: his stories are infused with the improbable grace of the spirit that ought to collapse, but cannot. For in these extraordinary pieces of fiction, it is not goodness that finally redeems us, but the heart’s illogical resilience, and the ennobling tenacity with which we cling to each other and to our lives.
Genre: Fiction > General Fiction/Classics
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