Blurbs have been promised by Marilynne Robinson and Elizabeth McCracken. As a professor at Harvard, Paul will have the oppurtunity to get the novel into the hands of his colleagues for reviews, readings and lectures. The author will do readings and interviews to promote the novel, his connections to the creative writing department at the University of Iowa and Harvard will help in this. Reading dates to be arranged in the Northeastern United States. Since the author lives in MA and the novel is set in New England and vividly recreates the character and color of that area, it should make for a good local interest draw.
Paul Harding is the author of two novels about multiple generations of a New England family: the Pulitzer Prize-winning Tinkers and Enon. A graduate of the University of Massachusetts, he was a drummer for the band Cold Water Flat before earning his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Harding has also received a Guggenheim Fellowship and was a fiction fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He has taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Harvard University, and Grinnell College. He now lives in Massachusetts with his wife and two sons.
Accolades for Tinkers
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction Winner
PEN / Robert W. Bingham Prize Winner
American Library Association Notable Book
New York Times Bestseller
Also . . . an American Booksellers Association Indie Choice Honor
Award recipient, International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award longlist
selection, Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum First Fiction Award
Finalist, and Center For Fiction Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize
Finalist
Named one of the best books of the year by the New Yorker, San
Francisco Chronicle, Christian Science Monitor, Irish Times,
Granta, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Barnes & Noble,
Amazon.com, and National Public Radio
Praise for Tinkers
A powerful celebration of life in which a New England father and
son, through suffering and joy, transcend their imprisoning lives
and offer new ways of perceiving the world and mortality.”
Pulitzer Prize citation
An exquisite novel, at once fresh and hauntingly familiar, simple
and profound, told with a voice so keen and beautiful as to leave
the reader in a state of excitement produced only by literature,
and the best literature at that.” PEN/ Robert W. Bingham Prize
citation
In this lyrical novel, the life of a dying man is examined through
the smallest moments of time and memory.” American Library
Association Notable Book citation
An exquisitely written novel that captures the mysteries of
relationships, memories and time passing in language that is both
spare and lyrical. It is a true gem that sparkles with
thoughtfulness, intelligence and life.” International IMPAC Dublin
Literary Award longlist nominee citation (from the New Hampshire
State Library)
There are few perfect debut American novels. . . . To this list
ought to be added Paul Harding’s devastating first book, Tinkers. .
. . Harding has written a masterpiece.” NPR Best Debut Fiction of
the Year
A complex reflection on memory, consciousness, and the meaning of
life.” Diane Rehm Show Readers’ Review” Book Club
A novel that you’ll want to savor. . . . I found reading it to be
an incredibly moving experience. . . . This book begs to be read
aloud.” Nancy Pearl, KUOW.org
This compact, adamantine début dips in and out of the
consciousness of a New England patriarch . . . In Harding’s
skillful evocation, Crosby’s life, seen from its final moments,
becomes a mosaic of memories.” New Yorker
Alive with gorgeous sentences.” Elle
A perfect read for reflection and short enough to finish in an
afternoon.” First for Women
[An] astonishing novel.” Los Angeles Times
In Paul Harding’s stunning first novel, we find what readers,
writ-ers and reviewers live for.” San Francisco Chronicle
Tinkers is a poignant exploration of where we may journey when the
clock has barely a tick or two left and we really can’t go
any-where at all.” Boston Globe
The life and death questions Paul Harding raises in Tinkers, as
well as the richness of his writing, keep a reader coming back to
it. . . . Like Faulkner, he never shies away from describing what
seems impossible to put into words.” Dallas Morning News
Vivid and original . . . Tinkers [is] going to be around for a
long, long time.” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
This beautiful novel is sui generis; the most insignificant events
. . . radiate fire and light.” Minneapolis Star Tribune
Few contemporary writers have [Harding’s] gift for uniting
language and nature through a powerful imagination. Tinkers is a
father-son story told with skill, depth and beauty.” Concord
Monitor
Stunning . . . Writing in an economical style and transcendental
spirit reminiscent of his friend and mentor, the award-winning
novelist Marilynne Robinson, Harding, who apprenticed with his
horologist grandfather, uses the clock as a metaphor for the cosmos
and its deeper intricacies and mysteries.” Louisville
Courier-Journal
This Cinderella winner of the Pulitzer Prize is alive with
miraculous sentences.” Cleveland Plain Dealer
Tantalizing . . . Tinkers takes an uncompromising look at the
complex emotional geometry that exists between parents and
children.” London Review of Books
Harding is a first-rate writer, and his fascination with what
makes his characters tick recommends him as a philosopher, as
well.” Time Out Chicago
This is a book so meticulously assembled that vocabulary choices
like craquelure’ and scrieved’far from seeming pretentiousserve
as reminders of how precise and powerful a tool good English can
be.” Christian Science Monitor
A novel with an old-fashioned meditative quality so perfectly done
that it is refreshing to read in a world filled with noises and
false excitements. . . . It brings the reader to a closer
understanding of his own life than he could have imagined before
taking the journey.” Yiyun Li, Granta.com Best Books of the
Year
Unique, captivating, and a measure more magical than most other
contemporary novels.” Guernica: A Magazine of Arts and
Politics
A luminous novel . . . that is not about death but instead an
investigation into what life is all about. . . . The precipice is
what Harding is so concentrated on, as though he were holding a
magnifying glass up under bright sunlight and setting fire to the
page.” Quarterly Conversation
Quiet, moving, breathtakingly crafted.” Library Journal Best
Books of the Year
Writing with breathtaking lyricism and tenderness, Harding has
created a rare and beautiful novel of spiritual inheritance and
acute psychological and metaphysical suspense.” Booklist (starred
review)
Outstanding . . . The real star is Harding’s language, which
dazzles whether he’s describing the workings of clocks, sensory
images of nature, the many engaging side characters who populate
the book, or even a short passage on how to build a bird nest. This
is an especially gorgeous example of novelistic craftsmanship.”
Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Filled with lovely Whitmanesque descriptions of the natural world,
this slim novel gives shape to the extraordinary variety in the
thoughts of otherwise ordinary men.” Kirkus Reviews
This excellent debut proves Harding to be a writer of exceptional
poise, possessing clear-eyed skill and, like his characters, a
steady hand for the finest of details.” Rumpus
Paul Harding’s Tinkers is not just a novelthough it is a
brilliant novel. It’s an instruction manual on how to look at
nearly everything. Harding takes the back off to show you the
miraculous ticking of the natural world, the world of clocks,
generations of family, an epileptic brain, the human soul. In
astounding language sometimes seemingly struck by lightning,
sometimes as tight and complicated as clockwork, Harding shows how
enormous fiction can be, and how economical. Read this book and
marvel.” Elizabeth McCracken, author of Niagara Falls All Over
Again
Tinkers is truly remarkable. It achieves and sustains a unique
fusion of language and perception. Its fine touch plays over the
textured richnesses of very modest lives, evoking again and again a
frisson of deep recognition, a sense of primal encounter with the
brilliant, elusive world of the senses. It confers on the reader
the best privilege fiction can afford, the illusion of ghostly
proximity to other human souls.” Marilynne Robinson, Pulitzer
Prize-winning author of Home, Gilead, and Housekeeping
A work of great power and originality. There is a striking freedom
of style here, which allows the author to move without any sense of
strain or loss of balance from the visionary and ecstatic to the
exquisitely precise. The novel is compelling to read, sometimes
horrific, and deeply moving because it is woven together into the
single quilt of our humanity.” Barry Unsworth, Booker
Prize-winning author of The Ruby in Her Navel
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