Shy carries a rucksack full of stones and a chorus of voices in his head-voices his Walkman and mix tape are unsuccessful in drowning out. Shy is set in the English countryside in 1995 and tells the story of a few strange hours in the life of its eponymous protagonist, who sneaks out of Last Chance, a home for troubled adolescent boys. Since his acclaimed debut, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers (Graywolf Press), he’s followed the cadence of his characters, coming to literature free of a conventional education in the canon. In his newest novel, Shy (Graywolf Press), Porter does more in fewer pages than virtually any Anglophone author, with expressionist storms that surge and sigh within a tight frame. He gives his reader, in other words, bursts of new vision.” A versatile artist who works across mediums, Porter writes with an ear for clauses that fit together rhythmically, the physics of words that seem to float above the plane of the page. Why? Because he’s always asking the most important questions and then finding ways-through innovative structures and that inimitable voice-of answering those questions soulfully, with his full attention, in ways that make the world seem stranger and more dear (or more dear because stranger). George Saunders said it best: “Max Porter is one of my favorite writers in the world.
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