The Boys of My Youth, Jo Ann Beard
The Boys of My Youth, Jo Ann Beard
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The Boys of My Youth

Author: Jo Ann Beard

Narrator: Jo Ann Beard

Unabridged: 7 hr 53 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 06/14/2016


Synopsis

The "utterly compelling, uncommonly beautiful" collection of personal essays (Newsweek) that established Jo Ann Beard as one of the leading writers of her generation.

Cousins, mothers, sisters, dolls, dogs, best friends: these are the fixed points in Jo Ann Beard's universe, the constants that remain when the boys of her youth -- and then men who replace them -- are gone. This widely praised collection of autobiographical essays summons back, with astonishing grace and power, moments of childhood epiphany as well as the cataclysms of adult life: betrayal, divorce, death.
The Boys of My Youth heralded the arrival of an immensely gifted and influential writer and its essays remain surprising, original, and affecting today.
"A luminous, funny, heartbreaking book of essays about life and its defining moments." --Harper's Bazaar

Author Bio

Jo Ann Beard is the author of a collection of autobiographically essays, The Boys of My Youth. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, Best American Essays, and other magazines and anthologies. She received a Whiting Foundation Award and nonfiction fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation for the Arts.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Thomas

Published in 1998, The Boys of My Youth received much acclaim and elevated Jo Ann Beard's reputation in the memoir/essay genre. Her most well-known essay, "The Fourth State of Matter," first published in The New Yorker in 1996, offers an incisive look into tragedy, grief, and the gift and curse of t......more

Goodreads review by Brendan

William H. Gass, that curmudgeonly king of American letters, proclaims with enormous exasperation that that “the perils of the present tense are pronounced.” In his 1996 essay, “A Failing Grade for the Present Tense,” he shakes his finger like a schoolmarm and scolds, “What was once a rather rare di......more

Goodreads review by Megan

This book taught me a lot about reading and writing: that is, what I want to read and what I don't want to read; what I should write, and what Jo Anne Beard shouldn't. The ambiguous, vague touchy-feely pieces on her family were Important Because They Happened to Her. In a very, very negative way. Th......more