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Get 'em Young, Treat 'em Tough, Tell 'em Nothing

Audiobook
0 of 1 copy available
Wait time: About 2 weeks
0 of 1 copy available
Wait time: About 2 weeks

Dark, profane, and hilarious, yet ultimately humane, these ten stories are the latest and best of Robin McLean's reports from the eternal battlefront that is the United States.

Ranging across the continent, from Alaska to Missouri, from the flatlands to the mountains, each tale is a snapshot of the political, racial, and sexual undercurrents roiling contemporary life, and each finds a way into the nerves and blood that pulse beneath the question of how to live a decent life.

Here you'll find stolen children living life to the fullest on the run and on the road, soldiers guarding empty frontiers, and rugged individualists brought low by an uncaring nature. You'll find prehistoric beasts rubbing talons with hustlers, as well as death machines lurking beneath the bucolic countryside. Here you'll find hatred, friendship, and pitch-black humor all seething in the same stew.

Get 'em Young, Treat 'em Tough, Tell 'em Nothing marries the sardonic moral and political explorations of a Flannery O'Connor to the surreal, scuzzy wit of a Denis Johnson. It is a brazen State of the Union for a nation on the edge.

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      August 29, 2022
      McLean (Pity the Beast) offers up a gritty and well-honed collection of mischief, desperation, and disaster in the American West. The multilayered highlight, “But for Herr Hitler,” follows a young family’s efforts at homesteading in the Alaskan wilderness until the mother, Iris, ends up with brain cancer. To fund Iris’s healthcare, her combat veteran husband, Eric, sells off their land, and he copes by drinking with buddies who share “brotherly jawlines” and toxic views toward immigrants, while Iris imagines what her life would be if her Jewish ancestors hadn’t been forced from Vienna by WWII. In the title story, a guard at a U.S. military base gets blamed for the night guard’s drunken shenanigans, causing him to lose his chance for evacuation during a strike from an unknown enemy. “Cliff Ordeal” channels the 1953 Robert Ryan film Inferno with the story of a man who accidentally falls during a hike and hangs onto the side of a cliff and imagines his rescuers as each day passes to the next. In the wondrously bizarre “Pterodactyl,” an archaeologist on a boondoggle in Las Vegas confides to a young stranger about a colleague’s betrayal, which allegedly involves the appearance of a live dinosaur in the desert. With merciless prose and a bold vision, McLean continues to impress. Agent: Stephanie Steiker, Regal Hoffmann.

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Dion Graham and Sophie Amoss narrate a short story collection overflowing with examples of how savage nature, fate, and life can be. The thread uniting the 10 morally unsettling stories is the inevitable crumbling of any plan, the phenomenon that anything that can go wrong most likely will. From a guard at a military base who is unable to leave before the invasion of an unknown enemy to a hiker who is clinging to a cliffside, Graham and Amoss capture the dreamlike aspects of the stories and transform them into engrossing performances. Characters crackle with life, while the unusual elements of the stories--for example, a pterodactyl in Las Vegas, a cat living in a pond--sound both real and unreal. J.M.M. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine

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  • English

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