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Kelsey Ford: From the Stacks: J. M. Ledgard's Submergence (0 comment)
Our blog feature, "From the Stacks," features our booksellers’ favorite older books: those fortuitous used finds, underrated masterpieces, and lesser known treasures. Basically: the books that we’re the most passionate about handselling. This week, we’re featuring Kelsey F.’s pick, Submergence by J. M. Ledgard...
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Tinkers

by Harding, Paul
Tinkers

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  • Synopses & Reviews
  • Award Excerpt

ISBN13: 9781934137123
ISBN10: 193413712X
Condition: Standard


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Awards

2010 Pulitzer Prize Winner

From Powells.com

Congratulations to Paul Harding and Bellevue Press for the recent Pulitzer win! And, we're delighted to say that Powell's featured a signed and numbered special edition of Tinkers in Volume 8 of Indiespensable, our exclusive book club. (View all of our past volumes here.) Less than 2,000 hardcover copies of Tinkers were printed, and 750 of those went to our subscribers! Wow. So, don't miss out on another extremely valuable collector's item, sign up for Indiespensable today!

Staff Pick

Tinkers is a haunting little book that weaves together the story of George Crosby, who is dying, with the story of his father, Howard Crosby. As George lies hallucinating, he tries to untangle the threads of his youth and finally come to grips with the enigma that is his father. Howard is an epileptic at a time in history when being so gets one labeled "insane." He suffers under that burden and finds a way of dealing with it that will haunt his son forever. Paul Harding writes like no one you've ever read: lyrical, poetic, spare, and lush. Recommended By Dianah H., Powells.com

Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments

An old man lies dying. Confined to bed in his living room, he sees the walls around him begin to collapse, the windows come loose from their sashes, and the ceiling plaster fall off in great chunks, showering him with a lifetime of debris: newspaper clippings, old photographs, wool jackets, rusty tools, and the mangled brass works of antique clocks. Soon, the clouds from the sky above plummet down on top of him, followed by the stars, till the black night covers him like a shroud. He is hallucinating, in death throes from cancer and kidney failure.

A methodical repairer of clocks, he is now finally released from the usual constraints of time and memory to rejoin his father, an epileptic, itinerant peddler, whom he had lost 7 decades before. In his return to the wonder and pain of his impoverished childhood in the backwoods of Maine, he recovers a natural world that is at once indifferent to man and inseparable from him, menacing and awe inspiring.

Tinkers is about the legacy of consciousness and the porousness of identity from one generation the next. At once heartbreaking and life affirming, it is an elegiac meditation on love, loss, and the fierce beauty of nature.

Review

"In astounding language sometimes seemingly struck by lightning, sometimes as tight and complicated as clockwork, Harding shows how enormous fiction can be, and how economical. Read this book and marvel." Elizabeth McCracken

Review

"Tinkers is a remarkable piece of work... fascinating — and sometimes horrific — to read, and is cumulatively moving because it is woven together into the single quilt of our humanity." Barry Unsworth

Review

"Every so often (and this must happen to you too) a writer describes something so well — snow, oranges, dirt — that you can smell it or feel it or sense it in the room. The writing does what all those other art forms do — evoke the essence of the thing. In this astonishing novel, Paul Harding creates a New England childhood, beginning with the landscape." Susan Salter Reynolds, L.A. Times

Review

"A beautifully written meditation on life, death, the passage of time and man's eternal attempt to harness it... one of 2009's most intriguing debuts." Carole Goldberg, Hartford Courant

Review

"Harding is a first-rate writer, and his fascination with what makes his characters tick recommends him as a philosopher, as well." Jonathan Messinger, Time Out Chicago

Review

"Harding's rendering is replete with a fantastic array of forehead-slapping ruminations and observations and adroit and elegiac turns of phrases... A remarkable book." Robert Birnbaum, The Morning News

Review

"This compact, adamantine début dips in and out of the consciousness of a New England patriarch named George Washington Crosby as he lies dying on a hospital bed in his living room, ‘right where they put the dining room table, fitted with its two extra leaves for holiday dinners’…In Harding’s skillful evocation, Crosby’s life, seen from its final moments, becomes a mosaic of memories, ‘showing him a different self every time he tried to make an assessment." The New Yorker

Review

"Harding’s interest is in the universalities: nature and time and the murky character of memory…The small, important recollections are rendered with an exactitude that is poetic…Harding's prose is lyrical and specific...Tinkers is a poignant exploration of where we may journey when the clock has barely a tick or two left and we really can’t go anywhere at all."The Boston Globe

Review

"At only a very brief 192 pages, it still packs an emotional punch that books of three times its length often lack. It's a novel that you'll want to savor for its stunning yet economical use of language, for its descriptions of nature, of illness and health, and for its profound understanding of humanity's deepest needs and desires for family and home. I found reading it to be an incredibly moving experience, yet Harding is in such control of his material that it never devolves into mushiness or becomes maudlin." Nancy Pearl

Review

"In Paul Harding's stunning first novel, we find what readers, writers and reviewers live for." San Francisco Chronicle

Review

"There are few perfect debut American novels. Walter Percy's The Moviegoer and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird come to mind. So does Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping. To this list ought to be added Paul Harding's devastating first book, Tinkers....Harding has written a masterpiece." John Freeman, National Public Radio

Review

"Writing with breathtaking lyricism and tenderness, Harding has created a rare and beautiful novel of spiritual inheritance and acute psychological and metaphysical suspense." Booklist (starred review)

Review

"Filled with lovely Whitmanesque descriptions of the natural world, this slim novel gives shape to the extraordinary variety in the thoughts of otherwise ordinary men." Kirkus Reviews

Synopsis

Pulitzer Prize Winner and New York Times Bestseller
There are few perfect debut American novels. . . . To this list ought to be added Paul Harding s devastating first book, Tinkers. . . . Harding has written a masterpiece. NPR
In Paul Harding s stunning first novel, we find what readers, writers and reviewers live for. San Francisco Chronicle
Tinkers is truly remarkable. Marilynne Robinson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Home, Gilead, and Housekeeping
An old man lies dying. Propped up in his living room and surrounded by his children and grandchildren, George Washington Crosby drifts in and out of consciousness, back to the wonder and pain of his impoverished childhood in Maine. As the clock repairer s time winds down, his memories intertwine with those of his father, an epileptic, itinerant peddler and his grandfather, a Methodist preacher beset by madness. At once heartbreaking and life affirming, Tinkers is an elegiac meditation on love, loss, illness, faith, and the fierce beauty of nature.
Paul Harding is the author of two novels about multiple generations of a New England family: the Pulitzer Prize-winning Tinkers and Enon. He has taught at the Iowa Writers Workshop, Harvard University, and Grinnell College. He now lives in Massachusetts with his wife and two sons.
"

Synopsis

An astonishing first novel of memory, consciousness, and man's place in the natural world.

About the Author

Paul Harding has an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He has taught writing at Harvard and The University of Iowa. He lives near Boston with his wife and two sons. This is his first novel.

4.8 32

What Our Readers Are Saying

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Average customer rating 4.8 (32 comments)

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YongJae , February 22, 2013 (view all comments by YongJae)
This books exists in small fragments, in memories or poetic ramblings or reflections on nature. It succeeds in being even more in total than any of its lonely wanderings down the rabbit hole of early America are in part. What makes this book truly special, however, is in after earning the reader's empathy, asking of him whether or not the sum of the experiences is for the characters as fulfilling as it is for the reader. In Tinkers, Harding creates a vivid and heartfelt world full of nature, memories, and family. His diction is excellent and this book is worthy of praise.

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Elizabeth Marker , January 18, 2013
The story is fascinating but it's the language that draws you in. It's evocative and poetic. Almost not prose. Combined with a plot that share's the memories of a dying man and of his father's life it shapes a natural world you want to live in. It's one of the few that are on my re-read list for the beauty of the language.

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jgrgas , January 01, 2013
A beautiful book that I cannot stop thinking about.

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Waney , December 30, 2012 (view all comments by Waney)
I'd love to reread this book one day and read it straight through without stopping (something I couldn't do as I was traveling). As it was, I did immediately reread many of its beautiful and complex sentences. After I was finished the book, I thought of these sentences as a trail (perhaps that's because I did a lot of hiking on my trip!) that leads you back to where you started. I first read these sentences in pieces, stopping to think, letting my mind settle on ideas and images, until I got to the end of the sentence and then I immediately started the sentence over again, not stopping the second time until I got to its end. Both 'hikes' were enjoyable, each time bringing different pleasures and insights.

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abookworm1966 , July 17, 2012 (view all comments by abookworm1966)
Very provocative novel...poetic and ethereal. I was compelled to see what happened through to the end. Can't wait to see what else Mr. Harding has to offer us.

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Book clubber , January 08, 2012 (view all comments by Book clubber)
Using the beauty of language and the transcendental thoughts of natural surroundings Harding finds in the life of a dying man memories that tell tales of his life before and after this final event. In the dying mind of George the reader visits people and events from his past to use as a lens into their own view of life and relationships.

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Kelly Barrett , January 04, 2012 (view all comments by Kelly Barrett)
This book was my favorite book of 2010 and 2011. It was that good. Never have I finished a book to only start reading it again. A tale so tightly woven that I got lost in the telling.

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Jim Carroll , January 04, 2012
It's hard to pinpoint the exact reason why this book touched me so. Perhaps it was because I had sat beside a hospice bed that had been set up in our living room, and watched my wife as she spent her dying days gazing out the window at the changing seasons. Or perhaps it was because, although good prose massages my mind, and good poetry caresses my heart, it is poetic prose that blends together all of the senses like the ingredients of a good recipe. After reading "Tinkers" I was left feeling like I had just read something great. And, in fact, I had.

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Diana Stack , January 01, 2012
Such beautiful use of language! I read it twice and would read it again to enjoy the word pictures and the gentle story of life.

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Annie Reader , September 02, 2011 (view all comments by Annie Reader)
This is an elegant view of the last hours of a life and more so of the lives before and after ours. What an amazing,fluid wordscape to travel through with the compelling characters we meet. As death comes close to those around me I am pleased to have Tinkers prose to meditate on.

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Dana H. , January 07, 2011 (view all comments by Dana H.)
I moved from New England (where I have lived most of my life) to California, where I had never been before, in September of 2010; I read Tinkers a few months before the move. I had finished graduate school the year before, and had not yet gotten back into my fiction habit; I picked up this book and fell completely under its spell. It reminds me somehow of a cross between Faulkner and Annie Dillard (sorry Mr. Harding - I don't mean to compare or take away from your own style - just an odd thought I had when reading). One of the most rewarding books I have read in a very long time. It has poetic moments, moments when time blurs or stands still, and moments of the utmost clarity. I recommended it it to many friends and will continue to do so.

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aguess , January 05, 2011 (view all comments by aguess)
This book is quiet and gorgeous. It sneaks up on you and stops you in your tracks. The descriptions of the woods as they change with the seasons are exquisite.

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Lpooh , January 02, 2011 (view all comments by Lpooh)
A fantastic book...

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Amy Hite , January 02, 2011
The story reels and bucks much like the Tinker's cart on bumpy old back country road, while transporting one through time and space like a rocket through a bright and blinding sky into the darkest velvet night. A man and his memories soar timelessly in his final days of terminal illness. With walls, ceiling, attic contents, sky and sound seemingly crashing into consciousness, he recounts loves lost, found and deserted, while discovering truth. A contrast of human and natural beauty in all it's fragile and rugged forms. MUST READ!

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oolongo , January 01, 2011
Concisely written telling of the last days of a man's life. Poetic tale of the memories of a life lived, the footsteps left by an individual upon this earth with beautiful descriptions of nature, clock repair and family relationships.

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annabella , January 01, 2011
fantastic!

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jlamf , January 01, 2011 (view all comments by jlamf)
In prose as finely wrought as the workings of the clocks that Harding's dying protagonist has spent his life repairing, this novel casts a spell on readers who will ponder the nature and interconnections of memory and existence.

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frequent flyer , January 01, 2011
Picked up this book at the Midway airport in Chicago this summer, read the whole book on the flight back to Sacramento...couldn't put it down. Beautifully written, worth re-reading many times.

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Noelle Pritchard , January 01, 2011
Tinkers, having won the Pulitzer Prize this year for fiction, is beautifully written, and is certainly proof that some of the best writing can be found in the smaller presses. Spare, yet expertly worded prose, and a story which is both personal and engaging. Tinkers deserved the acclaim it received, it would do all people well to read this book.

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Randall Nichols , January 01, 2011 (view all comments by Randall Nichols)
Amazing attention to detail and description, to the sense of loss and living.

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clf , January 01, 2011 (view all comments by clf)
I read this book for a reading group - a short book with such precision in the writing, but so many ways to read things. We had a lengthy discussion and each of us saw things the others did not. One of the best reads of 2010.

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Margo Miller , January 01, 2011
This is one of those rare books in which I paused periodically to re-read certain sentences because they were so well crafted.

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katealaurel , January 01, 2011
This book is superb. Even after reading it twice, I feel like I still have a tenuous grip on the interlocked patterns of Harding's stories and prose. That's as it should be; his writing echoes the dense clockwork at the center of his book, and demands the same kind of careful attention.

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Cleone , January 01, 2011
Ahh, Harding's active verbs! Ahh his intricate and flawless weaving of the stories of 3 generations. Perfect examples of superb writing to use in any writing class. His fresh images resonate.

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Gracie , November 26, 2010 (view all comments by Gracie)
This book is stunningly well written. The language is so beautiful, eloquent and expressive while being remarkably clear and simple. Harding writes of dreams and memories, fathers and sons, in an almost seamless narrative. He writes what for most people would be ineffable, and even the shortest passage is powerful. "Howard resented the ache in his heart. He resented that it was there every morning when he woke up, that it remained at least until he had dressed and had some hot coffee, if not until he had taken stock of the goods in his brush cart, and fed and hitched Prince Edward, if not until his rounds were done, if not until he fell asleep that night, and if his dreams were not tormented by it. He resented equally the ache and the resentment itself."

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Lisa Combs , September 20, 2010 (view all comments by Lisa Combs)
Who wants to read about a dying man? Not the blurb that ususally makes me pick up a book. But when I turned to the first page and began to read there was no way I wasn't taking this book with me. I read in the car, I read while waiting for my coffee to brew, I read instead of walking my poor pups. I read until I had to turn on lthe lights, I read until I got to the end and flipped through the book to see where I had jotted all sorts of notes and comments along the way. This is a gift of a book one reads for ones' self. Breathe in and know you are alive, that it is a beautiful finite journey and what is to come is yet another gift. Book cards make great gifts for all my reader friends, but this year, no card. Instead, I will give the reading pleasure I cherished, Tinkers by Paul Harding.

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L J Rod , July 15, 2010 (view all comments by L J Rod)
"Tinkers" is an amazing book. Harding's writing is beautiful. The book's characters develop before your eyes and will live with you after you finish the story. I've already given two copies away as a must read. Give this book a chance.

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W S Krauss , July 04, 2010 (view all comments by W S Krauss)
I liked this book and thought the writing was lovely. I don't know why it received a Pulitzer Prize. The descriptions of nature were beautiful and there were interesting ideas about clocks. For example, the idea that a clock is like the universe (read the book to find out why). There were many details about clock mechanisms and clock repair. We learn about a man, George, on his deathbed reliving parts of his life, and his father's life as well, from his memories. He tries to put the pieces of his life back together before his death. It was a pleasant read, but not astounding.

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lauragais , April 13, 2010 (view all comments by lauragais)
To pass the time waiting at yet another airport gate, I took the book TINKERS by Paul Harding with me. His debut novel, it was published in January 2009 and has 192 pages, a small book indeed, but a forceful, spellbinding and impressive one, a book leading to contemplation and soul-searching. The story tells about a tinker, Howard, a man mending broken pots and pans, a man standing for a vanished lifestyle, when time appeared to run at a slower pace and yet the days were full. And it is the story about another man, the late tinker's son George, who is slowly dying, in the house he built and amidst his family and all his lovingly repaired antique clocks, his entire life achievements if you will. The book deals with the relationship between a father and a son, and although Harding writes in great prose about the subject of the last days of life and impending death, it is truly a comforting book, somehow giving the reader solace by knowing what a rich and fulfilled life the characters enjoyed. A moving, spiritual story, told in a strong narrative voice.

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Elizabeth Ross , May 21, 2009 (view all comments by Elizabeth Ross)
This is one of those books that has prose so stunning that you feel compelled to read it aloud to someone else. My husband prefers nonfiction and will only read novels that I push on him and say "You have to read this!". He read Tinkers, even though I had already read parts of it to him, and LOVED it. So did I.

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Katherine Moore , February 03, 2009
A fabulously dense tapestry of words that create images that will stay with you long after you put the book down and that put together a story that is extremely touching. I hope this is just the first in a long line of books put out by Mr. Harding, his talent is top notch and so is this book.

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alwaysreadingx2 , January 29, 2009 (view all comments by alwaysreadingx2)
Maybe once or twice a year I will run across a book that strikes my eye at the local library, one I have heard nothing about, maybe the cover catches my eye, or the small size of the book is inviting, regardless, two days ago when I picked up this gem of a book little did I know what a treasure I held in my hand. I am an avid reader, and I catalog and rate everything I read on a scale of 0 to 5. This book is a five plus. Nestle in, grab a blanket and a cup of tea if you are in the throes of winter as I am, the house should be quiet, and prepare to be amazed at what you see before you. I was so glad to see after I finished it that Paul Harding is a young man. Mr. Harding, take your time, write, and write somemore. I wish I were younger so I could read all you will write. You will have a following of many happy readers. Buy two copies, as one you will keep, and the other pass on to your best friend. I say nothing here about what this book is about; that is for you, reader, to discover.

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Product Details

ISBN:
9781934137123
Binding:
Trade Paperback
Publication date:
01/01/2009
Publisher:
IPS TWO RIVERS PGW CONSORTIUM
Pages:
191
Height:
.50IN
Width:
5.00IN
Thickness:
.75
Number of Units:
1
Copyright Year:
2009
UPC Code:
2801934137125
Author:
Paul Harding
Subject:
Psychological fiction
Subject:
Literature-A to Z
Subject:
Reminiscing in old age.
Subject:
Dementia

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List Price:$16.99
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