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Review Quotes: "There are shades of Steinbeck here. It's very working class, there's dignity, there's integrity....it's heartbreaking and also uplifting at the same time. He's a guy that needs to be discovered." - Harlan Coben, TODAY "The Left and the Lucky is a heartbreaking, gritty, funny, and sensitive portrait of American life, complete with rich characters and a really great dog. I loved the main characters, Eddie and Russell, and read their story in one big gulp. Willy Vlautin is a terrific, emphatic writer." --Annie Hartnett, author of The Road to Tender Hearts "The Left and the Lucky is a gem of a story filled with quiet misfits, miscreants, and the misunderstood, each, in their own way, keeping hope alive and the small wins counted. Willy Vlautin's understanding of masculinity, grief, and the bonds found families forge is palpable. Deeply forgiving and memorable, Vlautin is a true chronicler of the human heart." - Tammy Armstrong, Author of Pearly Everlasting "No one anywhere writes with such power and such stark beauty about American desperation and want, American loneliness and heartache. We need Willy Vlautin like we needed Johnny Cash, like we needed Larry McMurtry--he's essential and every book he writes proves it all over again." -Joe Hill, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Full Throttle and Strange Weather "Brimming with compassion and hard-won tenderness ... the sort of novel you eagerly press into the hands of those you love." --Colin Walsh, Author of Kala "One of Vlautin' s signature gifts is allowing his characters to navigate the uneasy coexistence of resilience and resignation. Hope survives in small increments--temporary reprieves rather than salvation. Ultimately, Vlautin suggests that dignity can exist even, or especially, in lives defined by struggle and loss, and that such fortitude may be the ultimate triumph of the human spirit." -- Booklist (Starred Review) "With genuine affection, Vlautin captures his characters' humanity and longing, showing, for example, how Russell daydreams about escaping to an island where he can live without fear. Readers will fall in love with this ode to a struggling community." --Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) "A...compassionate and life-affirming tale about how human connection is critical to survival." "Vlautin explores a theme rarely seen in literature: the male caregiver.... Vlautin's writing is so easy and strong, he conveys characters and scenes through vivid detail. He can explain a character through the items he or she buys at the grocery store or the smell of their environment." - spokesman.com. "Willy Vlautin applies his characteristic compassion and spare tone to an unlikely friendship in The Left and the Lucky, a novel of hard times and scant hope.... Vlautin continues to focus upon an American underclass marked by desperation and poverty, people often forgotten or abandoned. With a gruff tenderness, a quiet lyricism, and moments of humor. . . . Vlautin's character sketches and the careful value he places on perseverance are not soon forgotten." --Shelf Awareness "Willy Vlautin has a way of writing about the simplest elements of living and making them emotional and heartfelt. You care about the characters and what happens to them." - Book Reporter Praise for THE HORSE: "A moving tale of suffering and redemption, The Horse portrays the immense gravity of what it takes to be human in tough times, and the elusive grace that might just be grasped from music, animals, and memory." - Geraldine Brooks "Willy Vlautin writes about people overlooked by society and overlooked by literature. In The Horse, he tells the story of a tenderhearted man who has a steady talent and a crushing addiction. It is both a work of extraordinary compassion and a really great novel." - Ann Patchett, New York Times bestselling author of Tom Lake "Might just be his masterpiece. . . . Set against the desolate majesty of the high desert, Vlautin's depiction of one broken soul trying to save another is aspirational, allegorical and, ultimately, transcendent." - Los Angeles Times "Willy Vlautin captures the American West like few other writers. His prose is always excellent, his characters always beautifully drawn, and that promises to be the case with his next novel, about an isolated Nevada man in his 60s who is visited by a blind horse that refuses to leave." - NPR "Enigmatic, beautiful. . . . The Horse taps a wealth of influences--Hemingway, Johnny Cash, John Huston's film The Misfits--but Vlautin's cadences and wit are his alone, sharp and bracing, like shots of whiskey. . . . He's a scribe of the underclass, reporting along the margins, teasing melodies from noise and silences. . . . Mythical yet inventive, a struggle between man and beast, The Horse follows the playbook of The Old Man and the Sea or Julia Phillips's recent Bear weighing the totemic natural world against the frailties of the human condition." - Washington Post Publisher Marketing: WINNER OF THE JOYCE CAROL OATES PRIZE "One of America's greatest storytellers."--Jonathan Evison Eddie Wilkens is a housepainter in his early forties. His wife has left him, and his one employee barely shows up for work. Unassuming and self-reliant, Eddie rarely gets angry, despite life's frequent provocations, but he is ruled by a guilt that he has carried for nearly twenty years. Next door, a woman and her sons move in with her aging mother. Russell is quiet and small for his eight years and lives in constant terror of his increasingly troubled fifteen-year-old brother, Curtis. As their mother struggles to keep the family together and the grandmother's health begins to fail, they find themselves unable to protect Russell and themselves from Curtis's cruelty, which threatens to explode in frenetic violence. Though neither knows it, Russell and Eddie will become each other's saving grace. Russell begins waiting in Eddie's backyard for him to get off work. Eddie feeds him, gives him odd jobs, listens to his dreams, and offers Russell a glimpse into a brighter world where a derelict muscle car can be revived, a loyal old dog waits for his friends, and Eddie and his misfit crew fumble through their days with humor and heart. In return, Russell helps Eddie lay to rest the guilt that has plagued him. Together, this makeshift father and son begin to build a better life, daring to trade the bleak cynicism around them for hope. Review Citations:
Contributor Bio:Vlautin, Willy |
