Teenager

LIT HUB'S MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF THE YEAR A whirlwind journey through a mythic America . . . Smith has mixed violence with fable to create this modern-day tall tale about two teens who love each other and say to hell with everything else. Each small chapter is akin to a section from The Odyssey or Don Quixote, snapshots that could stand alone but merge together to create a greater story . . . A new American folktale with teeth. -Kirkus Reviews Teenager won't make you want to be young again, but you may be shocked at what it awakens in you, the feelings and memories of long-buried past selves. Bud Smith asks us to not only remember those past selves, but to handle them gently. A rare novel that manages to be both sharp-edged and deeply romantic, classic yet wholly fresh. -Jean Kyoung Frazier, author of Pizza Girl Teenager is a great artistic high-wire act and a gift to readers who still care about the timeless problem of young men and women finding their place together in this world-or not. Should Tella get in another stolen car with Kody and flee with him to the Montana of his imagination? Both quests are represented here, hers and his, Yin and Yang, and Smith tells it all with ecstatic wit and feeling and innocence. To have captured this duality on paper demanded more than wildness, more than heart-all of which Smith has to burn-but also will and skill and ingenuity. -Atticus Lish, author of The War for Gloria From the Graceland mansion to an alpaca farm in Montana, from a chapel in the Grand Canyon to the ancient forests of California, this is a love story as epic and eccentric as America. In prose that crackles and sings off the page, Bud Smith has written a humorous and tender new classic. -Mary South, author of You Will Never Be Forgotten Abused when not neglected, and with no patience for self-pity, Teenager's Kody and Teal are the latest memorable additions to that venerable American tradition of They're young, they're in love, and they'll shoot if they have to, lighting out for the west and freedom. Wildly romantic, blithely clueless and always headlong, they're above all else passionately appreciative of the miracle of someone else having chosen, of all things, them, and everywhere they go they reveal, in all its doofy and intermittent heartlessness and lethality, the America that spawned them. -Jim Shepard, author of Phase Six Bud Smith is a classic writer who taps into the absurd skillfully. His dry, deft, enthusiastic language guts without being sentimental. Teenager is a study on the gnawing, American desire for escape; the lengths we will go to elude boredom, find love, and feel connected. From Tennessee to Montana, I'll follow Kody and Teal wherever they take me. -Halle Hill, author of Good Women Written in sentences as spare and fine as line drawings, Teenager is a blood-soaked love story that is at once hopeless and hopeful, reckless yet redeeming. A ton of fun. -Lee Clay Johnson, author of Nitro Mountain We could use more writers like Bud Smith. Teenager is a lovestruck, cross-country road-trip novel following a couple of ill-starred delinquents on the run from the olds; and though we have plenty of novels that tell that story, this is the only one we have from Bud Smith. And that's good. -Jonny Diamond, Literary Hub