Fight Scenes

By Greg Bottoms

Book Overview

In an intricately linked series of poetic, short tales set in a 1983 suburb, Greg Bottoms portrays his life as one of two at-risk boys as they attempt to learn how to be--and what it means to be--men. By turns funny, disquieting, and moving, Fight Scenes takes an unsparing look at juvenile disaffection and the dark side of white, working-class masculinity. By narrating his experiences with childhood buddy Mark, Bottoms shows how many of America's young men learn to think about work, sex, weakness, violence, and themselves.

In a pared-down, highly readable style that brings to mind the work of Raymond Carver, Sherman Alexie, and Denis Johnson, Bottoms has created a work of literature that shows how even the most accepted forms of toughness can have a damaging, disorienting, and finally dehumanizing effect on everyone, especially kids.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1593761295
• ISBN13: 9781593761295
• Release Date: October 2008
• Publisher: Counterpoint LLC
• Length: 144 Pages
• Weight: 0.58 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.2" x 7.1"

Customer Reviews

Powerful

What a powerful and dream-like autobiographical novella! The book tells the story of two kids cut adrift in the suburbs in 1983. Each brief section is a single scene from their lives, written with the care of a poem. By the end you see how perfectly this is crafted to bring the reader to the author's troubling insights about how violence and being "tough" absolutely warp the lives boys.

Bottoms is the greatest author you've never heard of

There are few books that move with such sheer force; such wit and grit; such beauty and pathos. Fight Scenes is a masterpiece, the best book I've read so far this year. It is a wonder to me that Bottoms is not touted as one of America's present literary giants.

Spare, poetic, haunting look at adolescence in working class America

Greg Bottoms has once again produced a remarkable accomplishment of a book--spare, poetic, haunting. I don't know who writes about working class boyhood better than Greg Bottoms and I am continually blown away by the power of his prose. A must-read.