Synopses & Reviews
From the acclaimed musician comes a tender, surprising, and often uproarious memoir about his dirt-poor southeast Texas boyhood.
The only child of a hard-drinking father and a Holy Roller mother, Rodney Crowell was no stranger to bombast from an early age, whether knock-down-drag-outs at a local dive bar or fire-and-brimstone sermons at Pentecostal tent revivals. He was an expert at reading his fathers mercurial moods and gauging exactly when his mother was likely to erupt, and even before he learned to ride a bike, he was often forced to take matters into his own hands. He broke up his parents raucous New Years Eve party with gunfire and ended their slugfest at the local drive-in (actual restaurants werent on the Crowells menu) by smashing a glass pop bottle over his own head.
Despite the violent undercurrents always threatening to burst to the surface, he fiercely loved his epilepsy-racked mother, who scorned boring preachers and improvised wildly when the bills went unpaid. And he idolized his blustering father, a honky-tonk man who took his boy to see Hank Williams, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, and Johnny Cash perform live, and bought him a drum set so he could join his band at age eleven.
Shot through with raggedy friends and their neighborhood capers, hilariously awkward adolescent angst, and an indelible depiction of the bloodlines Crowell came from, Chinaberry Sidewalks also vividly re-creates Houston in the fifties: a rough frontier town where icehouses sold beer by the gallon on paydays; teeming with musical venues from standard roadhouses to the Magnolia Gardens, where name-brand stars brought glamour to a place starved for it; filling up with cheap subdivisions where blue-collar day laborers could finally afford a house of their own; a place where apocalyptic hurricanes and pest infestations were nearly routine.
But at its heart this is Crowells tribute to his parents and an exploration of their troubled yet ultimately redeeming romance. Wry, clear-eyed, and generous, it is, like the very best memoirs, firmly rooted in time and place and station, never dismissive, and truly fulfilling.
Review
"
Ill Never Get Out of This World Alive reads like the best of Steve Earles story songs, which means real good. The tale of a more charmingly haunted, trying-to-do-the-right-thing dope fiend you won't easily find." Mark Jacobson , author of
American Gangster and contributing editor for
Rolling Stone,
The Village Voice,
Esquire and
New York Magazine "This is an impressive debut novel. The characters are unforgettable, and the plot moves like a fast train. A fantastic mixture of hard reality and dark imagination." Thomas Cobb, author of Crazy Heart and Shavetail
"Steve Earle's first novel provides a haunting and haunted bookend to Irvings Cider House Rules. The ghost of Hank Williams walks through this abortionists tale that has much to do with grace and aging and deathand the power of the feminine. Gritty and transcendent, Earle has successfully created his own potion of Texas, twang, and dope-tinged magic-realism." Alice Randall, author of The Wind Done Gone and Pushkin and the Queen of Spades
"Steve Earle is afflicted with the curse of being multitalented. A legendary musician, songwriter, entertainer, poet, and social activist, now with this debut novel he proves that he's a novelist of the first order. Laying bare the emotional history of country music, he takes the reader through a dark seedy dangerous world and back into a dawn of redemption. Steve Earle writes like a shimmering neon angel." Kinky Friedman, author of Heroes of a Texas Childhood (among many others)
"Everyone knows that Steve Earle ranks among the very best, and most authentic, songwriters in the history of America. With his first novel, Earle has established himself as one of our most knowledgeable and sympathetic writers period. He is a natural-born storyteller. If Jesus were to return tomorrow to 21st-century America, and do some street preaching on the gritty South Presa Strip of San Antonio, hed love Earles magnificently human, big-hearted drifters." Howard Frank Mosher, author of On Kingdom Mountain and Waiting for Teddy Williams
"Outsider artists like Steve Earle bring a breath of fresh air to the literary world. I just wish they'd come around more often. I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive is richly imagined and handily crafteda mighty fine piece of storytelling." Madison Smartt Bell, author of All Souls Rising and Devil's Dream
"Steve Earle has created a potent blend of realism and mysticism in this compelling, morally complex story of troubled souls striving for a last chance at redemption. Musician, actor, and now novelistis there another artist in America with such wide-ranging talent?" Ron Rash, author of Serena and One Foot in Eden
Review
"Earle (a hell of a songwriter himself) has written
a deft, big-spirited novel about sin, faith, redemption, and the family of man." --
Entertainment Weekly "Earle draws on the rough-and-tumble tenderness in his music to create
a witty, heartfelt story of hope, forgiveness, and redemption." --
Booklist "In this spruce debut novel...hard-core troubadour Earle ponders miracles, morphine and mortality in 1963 San Antonio... With its Charles Portis vibe and the author's immense cred as a musician and actor, this should have no problem finding the wide audience it deserves." --
Publishers Weekly "A thematically ambitious debut novel that draws from the writer's experience, yet isn't simply a memoir in the guise of fiction...richly imagined..." --
Kirkus Reviews, starred "Steve Earle brings to his prose the same authenticity, poetic spirit and cinematic energy he projects in his music.
Ill Never Get Out of This World Alive is like a dream you can't shake, offering beauty and remorse, redemption in spades." —Patti Smith ". . . a doctor, a Mexican girl, an Irish priest, the ghost of Hank Williams, and JFK the day before he dies. This subtle and dramatic book is the work of a brilliant songwriter who has moved from song to orchestral ballad with astonishing ease." —Michael Ondaatje "A rich, raw mix of American myth and hard social reality, of faith and doubt, always firmly rooted in a strong sense of character." —Charles Frazier "Steve Earle writes like a shimmering neon angel." —Kinky Friedman "Earle has created a potent blend of realism and mysticism in this compelling, morally complex story of troubled souls striving for a last chance at redemption. Musician, actor, and now novelist—is there another artist in America with such wide-ranging talent?" —Ron Rash "The characters are unforgettable, and the plot moves like a fast train. A fantastic mixture of hard reality and dark imagination." —Thomas Cobb "Raw, honest and unafraid, this novel veers in and out of the lives of its many memorable characters with flawless pitch. Earle has given us dozens of remarkable songs, he has given us a dazzling collection of short stories, and now here's his first novel, a doozy from a great American storyteller." —Tom Franklin "A haunting and haunted bookend to Irvings
Cider House Rules. Gritty and transcendent, Earle has successfully created his own potion of Texas, twang, and dope-tinged magic-realism."
—Alice Randall "If Jesus were to return tomorrow to twenty-first-century America, and do some street preaching on the gritty South Presa Strip of San Antonio, hed love Earles magnificently human, big-hearted drifters." —Howard Frank Mosher "Colorful, cool, and downright gripping." —Robert Earl Keen "Reads like the best of Steve Earles story songs, which means real good. The tale of a more charmingly haunted, trying-to-do-the-right-thing dope fiend you wont easily find." —Mark Jacobson "The best book I've read since The Road. As much or more than any other artist of his generation Steve Earle rises to the call, culturally and politically, traditionally in folk and country and rock music and what hes added there, and with acting and writing for theater, and now with all the literary forms crescendoing in this beautiful novel. He just keeps stepping up." —R. B. Morris "Steve Earle astonishes us yet again. Country Rock's outlaw legend brings the ghost of Hank Williams to life in a gloriously gritty first novel that soars like a song. And echoes in the heart." —Terry Bisson
"A mighty fine piece of storytelling." —Madison Smartt Bell
Synopsis
The only child of a hard-drinking father and a Holy Roller mother, Rodney was no stranger to either barroom brawls or Pentecostal sermons. Though anguished by their violent predilections, he adored his epilepsy-racked mother, who scorned boring preachers and improvised wildly when the bills went unpaid. And he idolized his blustering father, a honkytonk man who took his son to hear Hank Williams and Johnny Cash, and had him playing drums in his band at age eleven.
Shot through with neighborhood capers, raggedy friends, hilariously awkward adolescent angst, and an indelible depiction of the bloodlines he came from, ChinaberrySidewalks vividly recreates frontier Houston, where icehouses sold beer by the gallon and apocalyptic hurricanes were a fact of life. But at its heart this is Crowell’s tribute to his parents and their troubled yet ultimately redeeming romance. Wry, clear-eyed, and generous, it is, like the very best memoirs, firmly rooted, never dismissive, and truly fulfilling.
Synopsis
Singer-songwriter Crowell reveals his life as the only child of a hard-drinking father and a Holy Roller mother, growing up in frontier Houston. However, at the heart of this memoir is Crowell's tribute to his parents and their troubled yet redeeming romance.
Synopsis
Doc Ebersole lives with the ghost of Hank Williams—not just in the figurative sense, not just because he was one of the last people to see him alive, and not just because he is rumored to have given Hank the final morphine dose that killed him.
In 1963, ten years after Hank's death, Doc himself is wracked by addiction. Having lost his license to practice medicine, his morphine habit isn't as easy to support as it used to be. So he lives in a rented room in the red-light district on the south side of San Antonio, performing abortions and patching up the odd knife or gunshot wound. But when Graciela, a young Mexican immigrant, appears in the neighborhood in search of Doc's services, miraculous things begin to happen. Graciela sustains a wound on her wrist that never heals, yet she heals others with the touch of her hand. Everyone she meets is transformed for the better, except, maybe, for Hank's angry ghost—who isn't at all pleased to see Doc doing well.
A brilliant excavation of an obscure piece of music history, Steve Earle's I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive is also a marvelous novel in its own right, a ballad of regret and redemption, and of the ways in which we remake ourselves and our world through the smallest of miracles.
Synopsis
A brilliant tale of regret and redemption set in the wake of Hank Williams' death by morphine overdose, Steve Earle brings an obscure piece of music history to life in this debut novel.
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About the Author
STEVE EARLE is a singer-songwriter, actor, activisit, and the author of the story collection Doghouse Roses. He has released over a dozen critically acclaimed albums, including the Grammy winners The Revolution Starts Now, Washington Square Serenade, and Townes. He has appeared on film and television, with celebrated roles in The Wire and Treme. Frequently interviewed and profiled in the press, he often tours with his wife, singer-songwriter Allison Moorer.