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The Small Backs of Children

by Lidia Yuknavitch
The Small Backs of Children

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  • Synopses & Reviews
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ISBN13: 9780062383242
ISBN10: 0062383248
Condition: Standard
DustJacket: Standard

All Product Details

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Awards

Winner of the 2016 Oregon Book Award for Fiction
Winner of the 2016 Oregon Book Award Reader's Choice

From Powells.com

Staff Top Fives 2015

Our favorite books of the year.


Staff Pick

Lidia Yuknavitch revisits the aching wound of her stillborn child in The Small Backs of Children. While fiction, this moving novel reads like nonfiction — it is so personal. Yuknavitch has the rare and almost magical ability to write beautifully about things that are horrific. Gathering together the stories of several characters, each playing a part in an elaborate plot to save their friend, Yuknavitch delivers a gorgeous, heartbreaking tale of friendship, guilt, redemption, and healing. Recommended By Dianah H., Powells.com

Fiercely powerful, at times horrific, always gorgeous, Yuknavich's new novel does what she does best — makes you think. About writing, sexuality, brutality, the nature of our obsessions, the projections of our grief, and the strange, contradictory bits of architecture — both chasm and bridge — between reality and art. Recommended By Gigi L., Powells.com

Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments

In a war-torn village in Eastern Europe, an American photographer captures a heart-stopping image: a young girl flying toward the lens, fleeing a fiery explosion that has engulfed her home and family. The image, instantly iconic, garners acclaim and prizes and, in the United States, becomes a subject of obsession for one writer, the photographer's best friend, who has suffered a devastating tragedy of her own.

In a bid to save the writer from a spiraling depression, her filmmaker husband enlists a group of friends including a fearless bisexual poet, an ingenuous performance artist, and the writer's playwright brother and painter ex-husband to rescue the unknown girl and bring her to the United States. And yet, as their plot unfolds, everything we know comes into question: What does the writer really want? Who is controlling the action? And what will happen when these two worlds — East and West, real and virtual — collide?

A fierce, provocative, and deeply affecting novel exploring the often violent borders between war and sex, love and art, The Small Backs of Children is a major step forward from one of our most avidly watched writers.

Review

"This intensely powerful memoir touches depths yet unheard of in contemporary writing. I read it at one sitting and wondered for days after about love, time, and truth. Can't get me any more excited than this." Andrei Codrescu, author of The Poetry Lesson

Review

“Lidia Yuknavitch isn't afraid of anything. We need her sudden cyclonic no-holds-barred wisdom more than ever right now, to hold our feet to the fire, to make us brave in the face of our own impotence, to kick our artistic asses into gear.” Pam Houston, author of Contents May Have Shifted

Review

“You can make the case that Lidia Yuknavitch is the most compelling writer alive. The Small Backs of Children has moments of séance with writers like Jean Rhys and Clarice Lispector. I felt bewitched, possessed, destroyed, and yet I'd do it again.” Porochista Khakpour

Review

The Small Backs of Children is intelligent yet accessible, provocative in the best ways, complex yet tightly plotted and riveting. The characters are beautifully drawn, and together their story raises important questions — about violence, art, sex, and survival — that are both timely and enduring. And the writing — the writing is sublime. Whitney Otto

Review

“There are a handful of books that have changed the way I move through the world. The Small Backs of Children is one of them. Lidia Yuknavitch writes with sly, subversive, nervy, compassionate madness. She is one of the great American writers.” Chelsea Cain, < i=""> New York Times <> bestselling author

Review

"Yuknavitch moves through narratives and structures like a literary banshee seeking a body. Fast, visceral, The Small Backs of Children is a gunshot meditation on art and violence and I couldn't put it down." Vanessa Veselka, author of Zazen

Review

“All my youth I gloried in the wild, exulting, rollercoaster prose and questing narratives of Henry Miller, Charles Bukowski, and Jack Kerouac, but cringed at the misogyny; couldn't we have the former without the latter? We can, because: Lidia Yuknavitch. Buckle your seat belts; its gonna be a wild feminist ride.” Rebecca Solnit, author of Men Explain Things to Me and The Faraway Nearby

Review

”Yuknavitch is a gifted writer whose dizzying passages are often as compelling as they are grotesque.” Kirkus Reviews

About the Author

Lidia Yuknavitch is the author of the widely acclaimed memoir The Chronology of Water and the novel Dora: A Headcase. Her writing has appeared in the Atlantic, the Iowa Review, Mother Jones, Ms., the Sun, the Rumpus, PANK, Zyzzyva, Fiction International, and other publications. She teaches writing and literature in Portland, Oregon.

4.7 11

What Our Readers Are Saying

Share your thoughts on this title!
Average customer rating 4.7 (11 comments)

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lukas , October 10, 2015 (view all comments by lukas)
The rare book that I picked up because I liked the title. I'm gonna have to disagree with all the 5-star reviews here. Compared to Henry Miller and Bukowski, among others, Lidia Yukanivitch is certainly among the so-called transgressive writers and the graphic sex plays out like a more literary version of "50 Shades of Grey." I don't mind sex in novels, but it's always a little hard to take seriously for me and, frankly, it didn't really add much to the story. Yuknavitch's style is original, but draws too much attention to itself. Some chapters are only a sentence long, others have double instead of single columns. To what end exactly? The characters, rather than named, are simply girl, filmmaker, poet, etc. The best thing I can say about it is that it's an interesting failure.

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PCAnderson , August 11, 2015 (view all comments by PCAnderson)
This is the freshest, boldest, most remarkable book I have read this year. You probably don't know people like the characters Yuknavitch has created. However, there is a titillating voyeuristic sense of peering into lives and minds so different from your experience that you can't turn away.Read this book now, then read it again.

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tulsijo , August 04, 2015 (view all comments by tulsijo)
I read it in two days and then I started reading it again because it's that kind of book, one that ought to be chewed on for a while. Maybe it even nudges you to chew on yourself until you free your body from the trap of what we've been told stories are supposed to be. This story is not a formulaic feel good hero story; that's one of the reasons I love it and why you should read it.

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Jeff Forester , July 10, 2015
Like her teacher before her, Ken Kesey, his contemporary William Burroughs, and their predecessors Joyce, Faulkner and Kerouac (all men), Lidia Yuknavitch has changed what a narrative fiction can be. How narrative can exist and live in this world as art. She leads both the novel form and Daisy Miller from Henry James' male dominated drawing room and sets her against a world of pain and war and darkness on a white, white canvass where there is no place to hide. Yuknavitch's is a new landscape, a portrait painted with words drawn lovingly and violently from the bodies of women and flung against the mask of what we, as a culture, wish we were and tell ourselves we are. This book has changed me forever and I will imagine painting, film, poem, photography and narrative fiction differently, estimate art with a different soul. The rhythm of the language, the rhythm of the images, and the structure of the interwoven stories build not only a nearly unbearable dramatic tension, but slip like scent into the mind and dwell there. I will dream this work. Yuknavitch has broken my heart and restored my faith. It is a gift.

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David Craig , July 07, 2015 (view all comments by David Craig)
Why can't I add more stars? 6/5 is my ranking because this book is off the charts in terms of creative original writing. So many books, so many writers, but the voice of Yuknavitch on the page is distinctive, unmatched for its intense celebration of the human body and its capacity for pain and love. I read it too quickly this first time - in a rush of experiencing the book on its first day. Now I will take the rest of the summer to slowly read it, let is seep in, and try to understand this work of art at a deeper level.

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Kiki Liki , July 07, 2015
With the tone of McCarthy’s 'The Road,' and the structure of Picasso’s cubist women, Yuknavitch’s Small Backs of Children (SBOC) is a work of art. Set around one event from multiple points of view, including the writer (author), Yuknavitch has given us the story of the birth of art, that of violence on the body, from where art is made. Rather than a linear plot function, scenes echo out from an act of war all too familiar. The construct is beautiful. The notion that art is born from great suffering is not new but I’ve never seen it depicted like this. Unflinching. Female. Art in SBOC is made from the female body subjected to brutal violence. The violence of war, rape, childbirth, and death. The stuff of daily life. In the story, one act receives accolades for the artist, and so garners media attention. Wife, mother, daughter, artist, writer are redefined; art is made of their own agency. SBOC is filled with evocative imagery; beautiful, but like nature with its sublime aesthetic. Sentences stopped me dead still on nearly every page with their lyrical beauty. Repeatedly, I had to stop reading and hold the book to my body to sit with my thoughts. Ultimately art, born of violence too brutal to comprehend, leads to healing. I am not saying it’s a comforting read, but I don’t think it was meant to comfort. This is an important, intelligent book, it’s a force. Admittedly I am a great an of Lidia Yuknavitch’s writing. There’s no one like her alive and writing today. Her art is lasting art, and SBOC is a major contribution to statements made about our culture.

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Edwin George , July 07, 2015
By the end of the first chapter, I loved it so much I bit it. When you read Lidia Yuknavitch, her words will enter your bloodstream and will not leave you; she changes what it means to have a body. Yuknavitch tells stories not only through the meaning of words, but the way those words appear on the page; changing the nature of reading. She writes ordinary lives in their most primal moments, at the core of what it means to be human: in greif and sex and and success and violence and anger. The largeness of this story is too much to hold in a mouth.

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Stephilius , July 07, 2015 (view all comments by Stephilius)
This is sure to be what we call an "important work", a classic. Yuknavitch is - always has been, always will be - an absolutely FEARLESS writer. Fearless with language, fearless with structure, fearless in her exploration of the totality of human sensation, in all its ugliness and beauty. And her great field of creation has always been the female body. In this latest work, she's broken through - structurally, conceptually, thematically - to create an absolutely original novel; these pages emerge FROM the bodies of girls and women. In doing so, she's created a new literary from, I believe, a new terrain. This is a great work.

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Beth Couture , July 07, 2015
Lidia Yuknavitch's writing has saved my life and my heart a million times. This book will tear you apart and save you, too.

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LFG , July 07, 2015 (view all comments by LFG)
This book is a heart bleeder. It is sensual, exhilarating, cataclysmic. It is a novel as ars poetica. Lidia Yuknavitch merges every genre of art into this book: it's a alchemical, it grows stronger with readership, art feeding art ad infinitum. Yuknavitch has the courage and artistry to write about the tragedies inflicted by war and violence and to do something transformative with that enormous force of power that most of us are too scared to touch. Whatever you are doing--stop, and get this book. This is the kind of art that changes you. This is the new landscape of literature. This is the new wave now.

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Shane Hinton , July 07, 2015
Lidia Yuknavitch might be the most important writer you ever discover. She speaks for those of us whose voices catch in our throats. She's writing at and over the edge of new forms, ways of understanding, possibilities of being. She'll hold the door open for you. Take a step inside.

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Product Details

ISBN:
9780062383242
Binding:
Hardcover
Publication date:
07/07/2015
Publisher:
HARPER
Pages:
224
Height:
8.75
Width:
6.00
Thickness:
.75
Author:
Lidia Yuknavitch
Subject:
Literature-A to Z

Ships free on qualified orders.
Add to Cart
$12.95
List Price:$24.99
Used Hardcover
Ships in 1 to 3 days
Add to Wishlist
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This title in other editions

  • New, Trade Paperback, $15.99
  • Used, Trade Paperback, $8.98
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