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Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir

by Nick Flynn
Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir

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  • Synopses & Reviews

ISBN13: 9780393329407
ISBN10: 0393329402
Condition: Standard


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From Powells.com

25 Memoirs to Read Before You Die

Browse all of the exceptional memoirs that made our list.


Staff Pick

Poet/playwright Nick Flynn’s 2004 memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, is a poignant, wrenching account of the author’s time spent working in a Boston homeless shelter — and therein encountering his estranged, ex-con father. Flynn’s story is a compelling one, but as dark as it sometimes gets, it is tempered by ample humor and self-actualization. Candid, trenchant, and stylistically invigorating, Flynn’s memoir was the basis for the 2012 film Being Flynn, starring Paul Dano and Robert De Niro in unforgettable roles (Flynn later recounted the making of the film in a follow-up — and equally wonderful — memoir, The Reenactments). Another Bullshit Night in Suck City hums with vibrancy and a lyrical voice, with Flynn laying bare emotion and hard-won insight in equal measure. Recommended By Jeremy G., Powells.com

Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments

"Sometimes I'd see my father, walking past my building on his way to another nowhere. I could have given him a key, offered a piece of my floor. But if I let him inside the line between us would blur, my own slow-motion car wreck would speed up."Nick Flynn met his father for the third time when he was twenty-seven years old, working as a caseworker in a homeless shelter in Boston. As a teenager he'd received letters from this stranger, a self-proclaimed poet and con man doing time in federal prison for bank robbery. Nick, his own life precariously unsettled, was living alternately in a ramshackle boat and in a warehouse that was once a strip joint. In bold, dazzling prose, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City(a phrase Flynn senior uses to describe his life on the streets) tells the story of two lives and the trajectory that led Nick and his father into that homeless shelter, onto those streets, and finally to each other.

Review

"[L]ikely one of the best books you will read in 2004....Hilarious and heartbreaking by turns, it has been compared to Conroy's Stop-Time and David Eggers's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius but is really in a class by itself. Highly recommended." Library Journal

Review

"Readers of memoirists Frank Conroy and Tobias Wolff will relish Flynn's pungent account of two rudderless souls who navigate their way back into each other's lives." Booklist

Review

"The voice here is boiled just right: tough, articulate, mindful, without self-pity." Kirkus Reviews

Review

"What a piece of work. I don't usually like memoirs, but if they were all like Nick Flynn's Another Bullshit Night in Suck City — eloquent, funny, unsentimental, and bravely inventive — I'd read them by the truckload." Dennis Lehane, author of Mystic River

Review

"Ultimately, this book is an artful meditation on how we decide how much we are limited — or enhanced by — what we inherit, and on how difficult it is to give and receive care in this world." Vendela Vida, The New York Times Book Review

Review

"Another Bullshit Night... is one of the best books I've read in years — a heartbreaking searing story — the perfect memoir. Nick Flynn hurls himself towards the blunt trauma of history, towards his fear of what he himself might become. It is a story of self-discovery in the best sense, and also a story of the dissembling of history, the fight to keep oneself whole, and the inherent obligations of biology. In the end it is about family, about fathers and sons and how painful it is to know the depth of that relation at its fullest." A. M. Homes, author of Music for Torching

Review

"Nick Flynn's devastating memoir does what only significant works of art can do — it shows us a world we know, but fail to see or understand. No one who reads Another Bullshit Night in Suck City will ever walk through a city in the same way again. If I say that Flynn's book ranks with Frank Conroy's Stop-Time, I mean it as the highest possible praise." Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours

Review

"My favorite book of the past few years, and the best memoir since Stop-Time, This Boy's Life, and The Liar's Club." Chris Offutt, author of The Strange River Twice and Kentucky Straight

Review

"Flynn gets the details of the family down cold — egomaniacs with inferiority complexes, forever burning the bridges in front of themselves, cursed with a thirst for which enough is never enough. Gorgeously wrought." Thomas Lynch, author of The Undertaking

Review

"Another Bullshit Night in Suck City is a wonder, both sweet and agonizing, a fusion of the lyric and the well-wrought story. Nick Flynn finds, through the assemblage, piece by piece, of his own break neck life and father, what all of us must see; our fathers (living, dead, mercurial, solid, never glimpsed) are amazing and wretched; they are genius; they are filthy and naked; they are gut drunk beautiful. This book, in both story and language, shatters convention with every word, and Flynn makes that destruction flawless." Brad Land, author of Goat

Review

"Nick Flynn has given us one of the most terrifying families in American letters, though he approaches each character in this ferocious, inventive memoir with an almost radical sense of compassion, as if all that any of us could do were to stumble ahead with the burdens we're given. The result is a book so singular, harrowing and loving as to be indelible." Mark Doty, author of Firebird

About the Author

Nick Flynn is the author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, winner of the PEN/Martha Albrand Award, and The Ticking Is the Bomb. He divides his time between Houston and Brooklyn.

5 4

What Our Readers Are Saying

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Average customer rating 5 (4 comments)

`
pollyanna media , March 20, 2013
I'd heard about this book for a few years now and thought it wasn't for me--just not interested in the topic. I was wrong. Another Bullshit Night in Suck City stands out as a thoughtful memoir about loss and the stories we tell ourselves to get by. I've read many recent memoirs and this one had a beauty and humility to it that felt earned, honest and rare. Although issues like addiction and suicide are present, they don't dominate the story. Instead we get a very personal meditation on survival, forgiveness and understanding told with the ambivalent and jaundiced eye of someone not interested in peddling fairy tales or magical thinking.

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kalemama , January 01, 2013
Brilliant reflective writing that probes the pain and absurdity of various family tragedies and the author's efforts to cope, understand, and reconcile.

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Almeda Roth , February 24, 2010 (view all comments by Almeda Roth)
Absolutely one of the best books I've ever read. Nick Flynn's memoir is honest, poignant, funny, and downright odd. An inspiring writer of both prose and poetry, Flynn gives and gives and gives-- and still has something left to surprise you in the final turns.

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Julia Callahan , February 07, 2008 (view all comments by Julia Callahan)
Nick Flynn has this amazing way of disarming you as the reader. He jumps around in time and talks about events he wasn't around to witness, but you never really feel like you are jumping around in time or witnessing a secondhand account. This is one of the best books I've ever read.

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Product Details

ISBN:
9780393329407
Binding:
Trade Paperback
Publication date:
09/17/2005
Publisher:
W W NORTON & CO
Pages:
357
Height:
.92IN
Width:
5.52IN
Thickness:
1.00
Number of Units:
1
Illustration:
Yes
Copyright Year:
2005
UPC Code:
2800393329409
Author:
Nick Flynn
Subject:
Homeless persons
Subject:
Personal Memoirs
Subject:
Fathers and sons
Subject:
Poets, American -- 20th century.
Subject:
Biography - General
Subject:
Family
Subject:
Boston (Mass.)

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