The Sisters Brothers
A Novel
By Patrick deWitt
“A gorgeous, wise, riveting
work of, among other things, cowboy noir…Honestly, I can’t recall ever being
this fond of a pair of psychopaths.”
—David Wroblewski, New York Times bestselling author of The Story of Edgar Sawtelle
—David Wroblewski, New York Times bestselling author of The Story of Edgar Sawtelle
“A masterful, hilarious
picaresque that keeps company with the best of Charles Portis and Mark Twain…a
relentlessly absorbing feat of novelistic art.”
—Wells Tower, author of Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned
—Wells Tower, author of Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned
“The Sisters Brothers is
dark, dark, and funny, both ha ha and strange…and you’ll love the characters
you meet along the way.”
—Tom Franklin, New York Times bestselling author of Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter
—Tom Franklin, New York Times bestselling author of Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter
Patrick deWitt, a young
writer whose “stop-you-in-your-tracks writing has snuck up on the world” (Los
Angeles Times), brings us The Sisters Brothers, a darkly comic,
outrageously inventive novel that offers readers a decidedly off-center view of
the Wild, Wild West. Set against the back-drop of the great California
Gold Rush, this odd and wonderful tour de force at once honors and reshapes the
traditional western while chronicling the picaresque misadventures of two hired
guns, the fabled Sisters brothers. The most original western since the Coen
Brothers re-interpreted True Grit—you’ve never met anyone quite
like The Sisters Brothers.
Book Description
Hermann Kermit Warm is going to die. The enigmatic and powerful man
known only as the Commodore has ordered it, and his henchmen, Eli and Charlie
Sisters, will make sure of it. Though Eli doesn't share his brother's appetite
for whiskey and killing, he's never known anything else. But their prey isn't
an easy mark, and on the road from Oregon City to Warm's gold-mining claim
outside Sacramento, Eli begins to question what he does for a living–and whom
he does it for.
With The Sisters Brothers, Patrick deWitt pays homage to the
classic Western, transforming it into an unforgettable comic tour de force.
Filled with a remarkable cast of characters–losers, cheaters, and
ne'er-do-wells from all stripes of life–and told by a complex and compelling
narrator, it is a violent, lustful odyssey through the underworld of the 1850s
frontier that beautifully captures the humor, melancholy, and grit of the Old
West and two brothers bound by blood, violence, and love.
Critical
Praise for The Sisters Brothers
“Patrick deWitt’s
Booker-nominated tale of two hired guns during the Gold Rush, is ‘weirdly
funny, startlingly violent and steeped in sadness,’ according to Ron Charles.”
— WASHINGTON POST
“[A]n odd gem...that has
one of most engaging and thoughtful narrators I’ve come across in a long
time....The novel belongs to the great tradition of subversive westerns...but
deWitt has a deadpan comic voice and a sneaky philosophical bent that’s all his
own.”
— TOM
PERROTTA'S FAVORITE FICTION OF 2011 ON SALON.COM
“This bloody buddy tale of
two hired guns during the Gold Rush is weirdly funny, startlingly violent and
steeped in sadness — a reaffirmation of the endurance of the Western.”
— NOTABLE
FICTION OF 2011, WASHINGTON POST
“DeWitt’s THE SISTERS
BROTHERS is a glorious picaresque Western; everything about this book is
stylish, from its conceit to its cover design making it a truly worthy
inclusion on the shortlist.”
— DAILY
BEAST
“If Cormac McCarthy had a
sense of humor, he might have concocted a story like Patrick DeWitt’s bloody,
darkly funny western THE SISTERS BROTHERS...[DeWitt has] a skillfully polished
voice and a penchant for gleefully looking under bloody bandages.”
— LOS
ANGELES TIMES
“Thrilling…a lushly voiced
picaresque story…so richly told, so detailed, that what emerges is a weird
circus of existence, all steel shanks and ponies, gut shots and medication poured
into the eyeholes of the dying. At some level, this too is a kind of revenge
story, marvelously blurry.”
— ESQUIRE
“[T]here’s something
cinematic about Mr. deWitt’s unadorned prose style, which at first made this
reader do a double-take—can this be serious?—only to continue flicking the
pages with pleasure.”
— WALL
STREET JOURNAL
“By turns hilarious,
graphic and meditative, The Sisters Brothers hooked me from page one all the
way to 300 — and I could have stayed on for many more.”
— NPR.ORG
“Wandering his Western
landscape with the cool confidence of a practiced pistoleer, deWitt’s steady
hand belies a hair trigger, a poet’s heart and an acute sense of gallows
humor…the reader is likely to reach the adventure’s end in the same shape as
Eli: wounded but bettered by the ride.”
— TIME OUT
NEW YORK
“A feast of delights in
short punchy chapters.... Deliciously original and rhapsodically funny, this is
one novel that ropes you in on page one, and isn’t about to ride off into the
sunset any time soon.”
— BOSTON GLOBE
“Mesmerizing… The book
seduces us to its characters, and draws us on the strength of deWitt’s subtle,
nothing-wasted prose. He writes with gorgeous precision about the grotesque: an
amputation, a gouged eye, a con in a dive bar, a nauseating body count
[without] macho brutishness.”
—
CLEVELAND PLAIN DEALER
“DeWitt’s exploitations of
the picaresque form are striking, and he has a wonderful way of exercising his
comic gifts without ever compromising the novel’s gradual accumulation of
darkness, disgust, and foreboding.”
— THE
MILLIONS
“A gorgeous, wise, riveting
work of, among other things, cowboy noir….Honestly, I can’t recall ever being
this fond of a pair of psychopaths.”
— DAVID
WROBLEWSKI, BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF THE STORY OF EDGAR SAWTELLE
“Like Tarantino, deWitt
knows that attitude makes blood funny; like Twain, he understands a reader’s
willingness to forgive a good narrator’s personal flaws.”
—
CLEVELAND PLAIN DEALER
“[THE SISTERS BROTHERS] is
full of surprises, among them…is the quirky beauty of the language Patrick
deWitt has devised for his narrator.... THE SISTERS BROTHERS is deWitt’s second
novel…and is an inventive and ingenious character study. It will make you
impatient for the third.”
— DALLAS
MORNING NEWS
“Original, entrancing and
entertaining.”
— DENVER
POST
“Weirdly funny, startlingly
violent and steeped in sadness… It’s all rendered irresistible by Eli Sisters,
who narrates with a mixture of melancholy and thoughtfulness.”
—
WASHINGTON POST
“The brothers’ punchily
poetic banter and the book’s bracing bursts of violence keep this campfire yarn
pulled taut.”
— THE
ONION AV CLUB
“Funny and strange [and]
oddly warm…you’ll find yourself ashamedly pulling for the brothers Sisters like
you did for Jules and Vinnie in Pulp Fiction.”
— OUTSIDE
MAGAZINE
“Patrick deWitt’s
narrator--a hired killer with a bad conscience and a melancholy disposition--is
a brilliant and memorable creation.”
— TOM
PERROTTA, BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF LITTLE CHILDREN
“A bright, brutal revision
of the Western, The Sisters Brothers offers an unexpected meditation on life, and on the
crucial difference between power and strength.”
— GIL
ADAMSON, AUTHOR OF THE OUTLANDER
“At once dark and touching, The Sisters
Brothers has something on every
page to make you laugh. Patrick deWitt has given us a gift, reimagining the old
west in a thoroughly original manner. Readers are all the better for it.”
— CHARLES
BOCK, NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF BEAUTIFUL
CHILDREN
“…gritty, as well as
deadpan and often very comic…DeWitt has chosen a narrative voice so sharp and
distinctive…it’s very narrowing of possibilities opens new doors in the
imagination.”
— NEW YORK
TIMES BOOK REVIEW
“A masterful, hilarious
picaresque that keeps company with the best of Charles Portis and Mark Twain, The Sisters
Brothers is a relentlessly
absorbing feat of novelistic art.”
— WELLS
TOWER, AUTHOR OF EVERYTHING RAVAGED, EVERYTHING BURNED
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário