Synopses & Reviews
The prize-winning author of
Fire Season returns with the heartrending story of his troubled years before finding solace in the wilderness.
In his debut Fire Season, Philip Connors recounted with lyricism, wisdom, and grace his decade as a fire lookout high above remote New Mexico. Now he tells the story of what made solitude on the mountain so attractive: the years he spent reeling in the wake of a family tragedy.
At the age of twenty-three, Connors was a young man on the make. He'd left behind the Minnesota pig farm on which he'd grown up and the brother with whom he'd never been especially close. He had a magazine job lined up in New York City and a future unfolding exactly as he'd hoped. Then one phone call out of the blue changed everything. All the Wrong Places is a searingly honest account of the aftermath of his brother's shocking death, exploring both the pathos and the unlikely humor of a life unmoored by loss.
Beginning with the otherworldly beauty of a hot-air-balloon ride over the skies of Albuquerque and ending in the wilderness of the American borderlands, this is the story of a man paying tribute to the dead by unconsciously willing himself into all the wrong places, whether at the copy desk of the Wall Street Journal, the gritty streets of Bed-Stuy in the 1990s, or the smoking rubble of the World Trade Center. With ruthless clarity and a keen sense of the absurd, Connors slowly unmasks the truth about his brother and himself, to devastating effect. Like Cheryl Strayed's Wild, this is a powerful look back at wayward years — and a redemptive story about finding one's rightful home in the world.
Review
"Philip Connors possesses a quietly fierce and mesmerizing prose style, a skeptical and witty mind, a huge heart, and a haunted soul. Add it all up and you have one of the best younger writers in America. The story of is a moving one, but it's Connors's artistry that makes it transcendent." Sam Lipsyte
Review
"Philip Connors is one hell of a storyteller." Sean Wilsey, author of Oh the Glory of It All
Review
"Find room on your bookshelf next to Wallace Stegner and Norman Maclean; Philip Connors is here to stay." Alexandra Fuller
Review
"Philip Connors probably had to write for his own peace of mind; but in the process, he has given all readers a gift. As this sparklingly well-written memoir bores deeper toward the heart of something that cannot be understood, it keeps getting impossibly better, becoming that much more absorbing, that much more tender, more thoughtful, wry, and heartfelt. This is a marvelous book." Charles Bock
Review
"Combin[ing] lyricism with dark humor to draw lines between grief and the uncanny....Connors' story [is] told with harrowing and fierce prose." Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review
Review
"Affecting....Sharply funny....[Told with] subtle, evocative prose and depth of feeling." Publishers Weekly
Synopsis
The prize-winning author of returns with the heartrending story of his troubled years of flight.
Synopsis
In his debut Fire Season, Philip Connors recounted with lyricism, wisdom, and grace his decade as a fire lookout high above remote New Mexico. Now he tells the story of what made solitude on the mountain so attractive: the years he spent reeling in the wake of a family tragedy.
At the age of twenty-three, Connors was a young man on the make. He'd left behind the Minnesota pig farm on which he'd grown up and the brother with whom he'd never been especially close. He had a magazine job lined up in New York City and a future unfolding exactly as he d hoped. Then one phone call out of the blue changed everything. All the Wrong Places is a searingly honest account of the aftermath of his brother's shocking death, exploring both the pathos and the unlikely humor of a life unmoored by loss.
Beginning with the otherworldly beauty of a hot-air-balloon ride over the skies of Albuquerque and ending in the wilderness of the American borderlands, this is the story of a man paying tribute to the dead by unconsciously willing himself into all the wrong places, whether at the copy desk of the Wall Street Journal, the gritty streets of Bed-Stuy in the 1990s, or the smoking rubble of the World Trade Center. With ruthless clarity and a keen sense of the absurd, Connors slowly unmasks the truth about his brother and himself, to devastating effect. Like Cheryl Strayed's Wild, this is a powerful look back at wayward years and a redemptive story about finding one's rightful home in the world.
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About the Author
Philip Connors is the author of Fire Season, which won the Banff Mountain Book Competition Grand Prize, the National Outdoor Book Award, the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award, and the Reading the West Book Award. Connors's writing has also appeared in Harper's, n+1, the Paris Review, and elsewhere. He lives in New Mexico.