Item Specifics - Nonfiction Books
Author: Dow Mossman
Edition Description: Reprint
Publisher: Barnes & Noble
Category: Family & Relationships
ISBN: 0760748845
Coming Of Age
Format: Hardcover
Publication Year: 2003
Condition: New

Description:



FROM THE PUBLISHER

Originally published to glowing reviews in 1972, Dow Mossman's extraordinary debut is a sweeping coming-of-age tale that developed a passionate cult following. It recently inspired the award-winning documentary film Stone Reader, described by Peter Rainer of New York magazine as a marvelous literary thriller that gets at the way books can stay with people forever. Rendered with breathtaking artistry and emotional depth, The Stones of Summer captures the beauty and pain of postwar America. Its vivid evocation of culture-void Iowa in the '50s and '60s reveals in layer after layer of richly observed detail the maturationthe very soulof an artist. Its rediscovery was the catalyst for one filmmaker to confront his faith in the power of great literature to endure, and it can now be embraced by readers everywhere. Author Biography: Dow Mossman received his B.A. from the University of Iowa and his M.F.A. from the Iowa Writer's Workshop in 1969.

FROM THE CRITICS

John Seelye - The New York Times Book Review "The Stones of Summer" cannot possibly be called a promising first novel for the simple reason that it is such a marvelous achievement that it puts forth much more than mere promise. Fulfillment is perhaps the best word, fulfillment at the first stroke, which is so often the sign of superior talent.... Dow Mossman's novel is a whole river of words fed by a torrential imagination.... For me at least, reading "The Stones of Summer" was crossing another Rubicon, discovering a different sensibility, a brave new world of conciousness. "The Stones of Summer" is a holy book, and it burns with a sacred Byzantine fire, a generational fire, moon-fire, stone-fire. Publishers Weekly After its 1972 publication, this sprawling, modernist Great American Novel-style epic garnered its author critical comparison to Faulkner, for its saga of rural dynastic decline; Salinger, for its mood of youthful alienation; and Joyce, for its labyrinthine, cryptically allusive, stream-of-consciousness renditions of the private psyche. The episodic coming-of-age narrative follows budding writer Dawes Williams from boyhood on his grandfather's greyhound ranch, through a feckless Iowa adolescence of drinking and joyriding, to a mentally unstable adulthood in which, through rants against propriety, positivism and the establishment and a terminal bout of countercultural dissoluteness in Mexico, he becomes the voice of the 1960s' lost generation. The real action, though, is the development of Dawes's writerly sensibility, his-i.e., the author's-knack for transmuting the dross of reality into the gold of literary metaphor. But Mossman's own lyrical, metaphorical sensibility tends toward pseudo-profundities ("[h]er body was an inward fall, a deep spiral of musky sea lying easily within itself"), abstractions ("[s]he had a metaphysical eye, as blue as perfect nightmares"), and a synesthetic scrambling of sensory categories ("[h]e felt he could not listen to the light anymore, that it stood off in the distance, wordless with impossible opinion"). Long out of print before this reissue, the novel has generated a cult following among those who find in its inchoate but intense imagery the very portrait of the young artist's soul. But many readers may find the book's hallucinatory prose-"In the beginning there was me, green smoke and oatmeal, conscious light, all looking for a shoe to rise from"-interesting but self-indulgent, and the plot insufficiently gripping. (Oct. 22) Forecast: B&N CEO Steve Riggio secured the chain's right to reissue this epic for a healthy six figures in a deal that also helps finance distribution of the independent film about Mossman, Stone Reader. The Stones of Summer is an achievement, but at 600 dense pages, B&N may end up deciding it's better to stick to the classics. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

586 Pages
6.5 x 9.5 x 1.75 inches
Hard Cover
New / Dust Jacket

Additional Information about The Stones of Summer
Portions of this page Copyright 1995 - 2006 Muze Inc. All rights reserved.

Synopsis
This stream-of-consciousness novel is the story of Dawes Williams, who grows up in Iowa and enters the world of the '60s as a hell-raising counterculture figure. In the process, he grows as a writer. A film about Dow Mossman, the author of STONES OF SUMMER, was released in 2002.

Size
Length: 586 pages
Height: 9.0 in.
Width: 6.5 in.
Thickness: 1.8 in.
Weight: 35.2 oz.