Mr Bones
Twenty Stories
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- €5.99
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- €5.99
Publisher Description
Mr Bones is a sparkling and darkly humorous collection of short stories by bestselling novelist and travel writer Paul Theroux.
A family watches, horrified, as their patriarch transforms into the wise-cracking lead of an old-timey minstrel show. An art collector gleefully destroys his most valuable pieces. A young artist devotes himself to a wealthy, malicious gossip, knowing that it's just a matter of time before she turns on him.
In this new collection of short stories, Paul Theroux explores the tenuous leadership of the elite and the surprising revenge of the overlooked. He shows us humanity possessed, consumed by its own desires, always with his carefully honed eye and the subtle idiosyncrasies that bring his characters to life.
'As cool as Somerset Maugham . . . as observant, intuitive, wry, inventive and eloquent as Graham Greene' Sunday Times
'Theroux is fluent, witty and almost faultlessly able to deliver a satisfying story' Melvyn Bragg
'One of the most accomplished and worldly-wise writers of his generation' The Times
Paul Theroux's books include The Last Train to Zona Verde, Dark Star Safari, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, Riding the Iron Rooster, The Great Railway Bazaar, The Elephanta Suite, A Dead Hand, The Tao of Traveland The Lower River. The Mosquito Coast and Dr Slaughter have both been made into successful films. Paul Theroux divides his time between Cape Cod and the Hawaiian islands.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The 20 stories in the 30th work of fiction from Theroux (The Mosquito Coast) grapple with the all-too-human desire for ownership of art, of people, of places, even of stories themselves. Through his worldly male narrators, Theroux explores matters of taste and the compulsion to ruin a possession to mark it as your own. Even when the characters are not wealthy collectors or Andrew Wyeth prot g s, they're often interested in art in some way. The American accountant in Bangkok in "Siamese Nights," arguably the collection's standout, is a gifted caricaturist with a vivid appreciation for his unfamiliar surroundings: in the city's "moisture-thickened air that made you gasp" and "neon lights shimmering in puddles," he observes, you learn to see "beauty in half an inch of dirty water." This tale and others including "Nowadays the Dead Don't Die," about the enactment of African funeral rites contain notes of Theroux's famed travel writing. Beyond art and travel, Theroux also explores boyhood in the title story; presents a debauched Hawaiian love triangle in "Neighbor Islands"; works a twist on Maupassant's classic "The Necklace" in "Another Necklace"; and experiments with first-person flash fiction in two steamy interludes, "Voices of Love" and "Long Story Short." The final product is a hefty, remarkably diverse batch of stories colored by Theroux's prolific taste for exploration.
