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Published Oct 2016
288 pages
Genre: Biography/Memoir
Publication Information
"There comes a time in your life when the past decides to run you down," Mark Slouka writes in this heartbreaking and soul-searching memoir about one man's attempt to reckon with the past.
Born in Czechoslovakia, Mark Slouka's parents survived the Nazis only to have to escape the Communist purges after the war. Smuggled out of their own country, the newlyweds joined a tide of refugees moving from Innsbruck to Sydney to New York, dragging with them a history of blood and betrayal that their son would be born into.
From World War I to the present, Slouka pieces together a remarkable story of refugees and war, displacement and denial - admitting into evidence memories, dreams, stories, the lies we inherit, and the lies we tell - in an attempt to reach his mother, the enigmatic figure at the center of the labyrinth. Her story, the revelation of her life-long burden and the forty-year love affair that might have saved her, shows the way out of the maze.
"Starred Review. A moving and intense memoir from a gifted author." - Kirkus
"Madness, war, persecution, and suburban anomie warp a family in this sometimes grim, sometimes luminous memoir." - Publishers Weekly
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Photo: Leslie Slouka
Mark Slouka is the child of Czech immigrants, and draws on his personal experience and the inevitable intrusions of the past on the present. He is the author of the novel God’s Fool, named a Best Book of the Year by the San Francisco Chronicle, the short story collection Lost Lake, a New York Times Notable Book in 1998, and the nonfiction work War of the Worlds. Three of his essays have been selected for inclusion in The Best American Essays, and his short story “The Woodcarvers Tale” won the National Magazine Award for fiction. He is a contributing editor at Harper’s Magazine, and is the director for the writing program at the University of Chicago.
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