Pugilist at Rest
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€15.99
Thom Jones's magnificent collection of stories presents a brutal and authentic vision of the human condition, in a world without mercy or redemption. The Pugilist at Rest gives us an America of Vietnam vets and ex-boxers, of bitter lovers in trailer parks, of lives passing in brilliant epileptic flickers. These ferocious, semi-autobiographical stories form the debut collection by a distinctive and hugely talented writer.
Thom Jones was discovered as a writer relatively late in life, in his forties, by the fiction editors at the New Yorker, who published many of Jones's stories from the early 1990s onwards. The title story of this collection went on to win the O. Henry Award for Best Short Story.
Thom Jones, who died in 2016, was a National Book Award finalist, O. Henry Award winner, and the author of three story collections: The Pugilist at Rest, Cold Snap, and Sonny Liston Was a Friend of Mine. He received an MFA from the University of Iowa in 1973 and thereafter worked an array of jobs, from copywriter to janitor, until he was published for the first time, in The New Yorker, in his mid-forties. His stories went on to be published in other magazines such as Harper's, Esquire, Playboy, and Story and were reprinted numerous times in The Best American Short Stories. John Updike chose his story 'I Want to Live!' for The Best American Short Stories of the Century.