The Stay-In Weather Sale: 20% off select books
Used, New, and Out of Print Books - We Buy and Sell - Powell's Books
Cart |
|  my account  |  wish list  |  help   |  800-878-7323
Hello, | Login
MENU
  • Browse
    • New Arrivals
    • Bestsellers
    • Award Winners
    • Signed Editions
    • Digital Audio Books
    • See All Subjects
  • Used
  • Staff Picks
    • Staff Picks
    • Picks of the Month
    • Book Club Subscriptions
    • 25 PNW Books to Read Before You Die
    • 25 Books From the 21st Century
    • 25 Memoirs to Read Before You Die
    • 25 Global Books to Read Before You Die
    • 25 Women to Read Before You Die
    • 25 Books to Read Before You Die
  • Gifts
    • Gift Cards & eGift Cards
    • Powell's Souvenirs
    • Read Rise Resist Gear
    • Journals & Notebooks
    • Games
    • Socks
  • Sell Books
  • Blog
  • Events
  • Find A Store
McAfee Secure

Don't Miss

  • Looking Forward Sale
  • The Stay-In Weather Sale
  • Indiespensable 90:
    My Year Abroad
  • Our 2021 TBR List
  • Powell's Virtual Events
  • Oregon Battle of the Books

Visit Our Stores


Emily B.: Black History Month 2021: Black Women in Science (0 comment)
The books below are a starting point for delving into the scientific legacy of Black women around the world and for inspiring the next generation to follow in their footsteps...
Read More»
  • Rhianna Walton: Black History Month 2021: Rethinking the Classics (0 comment)
  • Rachel Marks: No Bull, Just Books: Recommendations for the Year of the Ox (1 comment)

{1}
##LOC[OK]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]## ##LOC[Cancel]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]## ##LOC[Cancel]##

Lanny

by Max Porter
Lanny

  • Comment on this title
  • Synopses & Reviews

ISBN13: 9781555978402
ISBN10: 1555978401
Condition: Standard
DustJacket: Standard

All Product Details

View Larger ImageView Larger Images
$16.50
Used Hardcover
Ships in 1 to 3 days
Add to Cart
Add to Wishlist
QtyStore
1Burnside

From Powells.com

Powell's Picks of the Month

Hot new releases and under-the-radar gems for adults and kids.


Staff Top Fives 2019

Our favorite books of the year.


Powell's Midyear Roundup

The Best Books of 2019 (So Far)


Staff Pick

A beguiling mix of midlife middle-class ennui, people-will-talk village intrigue, and full-on pagan folk horror. Experimental, but not difficult once you tune into the gaggle of quietly desperate voices, it brilliantly conveys the damp of the English countryside and the mustiness of an environment where everyone knows (or thinks they know) your business. Subliminal, hallucinogenic, and edged with terror. Recommended By Mark S., Powells.com

Lanny is a marvel — an extraordinary mythological examination of childhood and a gorgeous prose extravaganza of voices and narratives. Max Porter somehow captures the deep magic and blunt prosaic rhythms of life in the same sentences. Completely unique and absolutely worthwhile. Recommended By Jill O., Powells.com

The stage is set: Author Max Porter is the Pied Piper, and you are being called. Lanny will play your heart like a flute, luring you into its song of childhood landscapes, extending nature forward into its wild, animated state. And when the tune is complete, it will have fulfilled all its promises of consequence and heartbreak, in an astounding encore of reverie. Recommended By Aubrey W., Powells.com

A contemporary English folktale, a hybrid re-envisioning of ancient Green Man legends, and a multifaceted glimpse of a small, post-Brexit British village, Lanny interweaves ancient and contemporary British culture through its playful reinvention of fairy tale and myth. Dark, lyrical, and full of pathos, Porter is a master of writing about the challenges and joys of family, and particularly, of parental love. While many parts of the book are enigmatic and even puzzling, Lanny ultimately invites the reader to interpret the story how they wish. This is, the book seems to suggest, the power of myth. We can make it our own. Recommended By Ariel K., Powells.com

Porter writes the oddest, yet most compelling, some-sort-of fairy tale, complete with a chorus of villagers Who. Have. Opinions! on everything, a terrifying tree-man who might steal your soul, and a child who lives his life far closer to nature than anyone realizes, or perhaps, anyone else is able. Porter's Grief Is the Thing With Feathers was a book that came blazing in from nowhere, demanding attention, and Lanny is even more so. Whatever Porter has produced here (fable? parable? old wives' tale?), his stellar writing chops are up to the task. The tension that bubbles off the page will have you tearing through to the end. Gorgeous prose, a heart-stopping mystery, and the uncanny voice of the know-it-all villagers make this a must-read. Amazing! Recommended By Dianah H., Powells.com

Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments

Longlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize

An entrancing new novel by the author of the prizewinning Grief Is the Thing with Feathers


There's a village an hour from London. It's no different from many others today: one pub, one church, redbrick cottages, some public housing, and a few larger houses dotted about. Voices rise up, as they might anywhere, speaking of loving and needing and working and dying and walking the dogs. This village belongs to the people who live in it, to the land and to the land's past.

It also belongs to Dead Papa Toothwort, a mythical figure local schoolchildren used to draw as green and leafy, choked by tendrils growing out of his mouth, who awakens after a glorious nap. He is listening to this twenty-first-century village, to its symphony of talk: drunken confessions, gossip traded on the street corner, fretful conversations in living rooms. He is listening, intently, for a mischievous, ethereal boy whose parents have recently made the village their home. Lanny.

With Lanny, Max Porter extends the potent and magical space he created in Grief Is the Thing with Feathers. This brilliant novel will ensorcell readers with its anarchic energy, with its bewitching tapestry of fabulism and domestic drama. Lanny is a ringing defense of creativity, spirit, and the generative forces that often seem under assault in the contemporary world, and it solidifies Porter's reputation as one of the most daring and sensitive writers of his generation.

Review

"Reading Lanny is like going to the back of the garden to find the exact spot where magic and menace meet. It's delightful and dark, stark and stylish, and as strange as it is scary — I loved it." Claire Cameron

Review

"[Lanny] delivers quite the punch with its combination of unlikely effervescence, authentic emotion, and literary exploration. . . . Porter has created both an entertaining tale and a novel of exceptionally creative experimentation and genre extension." Booklist (Starred Review)

Review

"Porter's prose is undeniably gorgeous. . . . This novel about family, the power of the woods and the creative spirit, centered on a special young boy, will charm any reader." Shelf Awareness

Review

"[Porter offers] the ultimate incantation of nature and its pitiless sovereignty. . . . Lanny is one of the most beautiful novels of the past decade." BookPage

About the Author

Max Porter is the author of Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, which won the International Dylan Thomas Prize and The Sunday Times/PFD Young Writer of the Year Award, and was short-listed for The Guardian First Book Award and the Goldsmiths Prize.

Powell's Staff on PowellsBooks.Blog

The world is in a weird place right now. This country is in a weird place right now. The book industry is pretty much always in a weird place. With so much weirdness to contend with, thank goodness there are books...

Read More»


What Our Readers Are Saying

Be the first to share your thoughts on this title!




Product Details

ISBN:
9781555978402
Binding:
Hardcover
Publication date:
05/14/2019
Publisher:
GRAYWOLF PRESS
Pages:
160
Height:
190.50 mm
Width:
5.00 in
Author:
Max Porter

Ships free on qualified orders.
Add to Cart
$16.50
List Price:$24.00
Used Hardcover
Ships in 1 to 3 days
Add to Wishlist
QtyStore
1Burnside

More copies of this ISBN

  • New, Hardcover, $24.00

This title in other editions

  • New, Trade Paperback, $16.00
  • Used, Trade Paperback, $9.98
{1}
##LOC[OK]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]## ##LOC[Cancel]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]## ##LOC[Cancel]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]## ##LOC[Cancel]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]## ##LOC[Cancel]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]## ##LOC[Cancel]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]## ##LOC[Cancel]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]## ##LOC[Cancel]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]## ##LOC[Cancel]##
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Pinterest
  • Instagram

  • Help
  • Guarantee
  • My Account
  • Careers
  • About Us
  • Security
  • Wish List
  • Partners
  • Contact Us
  • Shipping
  • Sitemap
  • © 2021 POWELLS.COM Terms

{1}
##LOC[OK]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]## ##LOC[Cancel]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]## ##LOC[Cancel]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]## ##LOC[Cancel]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]## ##LOC[Cancel]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]## ##LOC[Cancel]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]## ##LOC[Cancel]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]## ##LOC[Cancel]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]## ##LOC[Cancel]##