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A vivid and assured work of fiction, from a major new voice, following the life of a young man growing up, leaving home, and coming back again, marked by the start beauty of California's Mojave Desert and the various fates of those who leave and those who stay behind.
This series of powerful, intertwining stories illuminates Daley Kushner's world, the family, friends and community that have both formed and constrained him, and his new life in San Francisco. Back home, the desert preys on those who cannot conform: an alfalfa farmer on the outskirts of town; two young girls whose curiosity leads to danger; a black politician who once served as his school's confederate mascot; Daley's mother, an immigrant from Armenia; and Daley himself, introspective and queer. Meanwhile, in another desert on the other side of the world, war threatens to fracture Daley's most meaningful, and most fraught, connection to home, his friendship with Robert Karinger.
A luminous debut, Desert Boys by Chris McCormick traces the development of towns into cities, of boys into men, and the haunting effects produced when the two transformations overlap. Both a bildungsroman and a portrait of a changing place, the book mines the terrain between the desire to escape and the hunger to belong.
This series of powerful, intertwining stories illuminates Daley Kushner's world, the family, friends and community that have both formed and constrained him, and his new life in San Francisco. Back home, the desert preys on those who cannot conform: an alfalfa farmer on the outskirts of town; two young girls whose curiosity leads to danger; a black politician who once served as his school's confederate mascot; Daley's mother, an immigrant from Armenia; and Daley himself, introspective and queer. Meanwhile, in another desert on the other side of the world, war threatens to fracture Daley's most meaningful, and most fraught, connection to home, his friendship with Robert Karinger.
A luminous debut, Desert Boys by Chris McCormick traces the development of towns into cities, of boys into men, and the haunting effects produced when the two transformations overlap. Both a bildungsroman and a portrait of a changing place, the book mines the terrain between the desire to escape and the hunger to belong.
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Reviews
"Desert Boys is a show off's debut, the work of an unabashed polyglot. There seems to be nothing Chris McCormick can't do: smartypants metafictional experiment, heart-pounding thriller, eulogy for boyhood bonds, meditation on sexuality and post-9/11 intolerance. These linked stories assemble into a kind of compound eye through which we glimpse an oft-forgotten corner of California and, most superb
Claire Vaye Watkins, author of Battleborn and Gold Fame Citrus
"In the hands of this young master of purified prose, ambition, love, and the restlessness of boyhood are trapped as if in a crystal vial. No reader will be able to turn away."
Chigozie Obioma, author of The Fishermen
"Desert Boys is hilarious, devious, original, and unforgettable; Chris McCormick writes with a joyful swerve and swagger that is all his own."
Karen Russell, New York Times bestselling author of Vampires in the Lemon Grove