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The Hero's Body

William Giraldi

$19.99

Paperback

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English
No Exit Press
01 November 2017
"A memoir of motorcycles and muscles, of obsession and grief, and of a young man who learned how to stay alive through literature.

At just forty-seven years old, William Giraldi's father was killed in a horrific motorcycle crash while racing on a country road. This tragedy, which forever altered the young Giraldi and devastated his family, provides the pulse for The Hero's Body. In the tradition of Andre Dubus III's Townie, this is a deep-seeing investigation into two generations of men from the working-class town of Manville, New Jersey, including Giraldi's own forays into obsessive bodybuilding as a teenager desperate to be worthy of his family's pitiless, exacting codes of manhood. 

Lauded by The New Yorker for his ""unrelenting, perfectly paced prose"", Giraldi writes here with daring, searing honesty about the fragility and might of the American male. An unflinching memoir of luminous sorrow, a son's tale of a lost father and the ancient family strictures of extreme masculinity, The Hero's Body is a work of lasting beauty by one of our most fearless writers.

Featured in The Telegraph here. 

""I really do hope to win this,"" he says. ""I really hope for them to understand that they could be men while loving literature and music and art, that real men are merciful, that real men are kind, that real men show love towards those who are weaker, not scorn"" ~ The Guardian.

""I keep reading books on masculinity, and what the author usually says is that a lot of masculine culture is learned behaviour — nurture rather than nature. Well, maybe so. But it feels like there's a lot of nature here underneath all the nurture. Something unprocessed and primal. That's what I mean when I say it's raw"" ~ The Spectator."

By:  
Imprint:   No Exit Press
Country of Publication:   United Kingdom
Dimensions:   Height: 198mm,  Width: 129mm, 
ISBN:   9780857301086
ISBN 10:   085730108X
Pages:   320
Publication Date:  
Audience:   General/trade ,  ELT Advanced
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active

William Giraldi grew up in Manville, New Jersey, and attended college at Drew University and Boston University. He is author of the novels Busy Monsters and Hold the Dark, fiction editor for the journal AGNI at Boston University, and a contributing editor at The New Republic. He's been granted fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The Oxford American, The New York Times, The Sun, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Baffler, Ploughshares, The Wall Street Journal, The New Criterion, and online at The Daily Beast and Salon. He lives in Boston with his wife and sons.

Reviews for The Hero's Body

Is this the best book I've ever read on the subject of masculinity? Maybe it is -- William Leith * The Spectator * While many of the ideas he raises are universal, The Hero's Body is a somewhat turbocharged, uniquely American take on what it means to be male -- Jack Urwin * The Guardian * I've never read anything like this. Superbly written -- William Leith * Evening Standard * A powerful autobiographical memoir -- David Matthews * Big Issue North * an absorbing memoir [...] Giraldi urges us to put aside our preconceptions and appreciate bodybuilding as an aesthetic pursuit, and the bodybuilder as a kind of 'walking poetry': in his narcissistic perfectionism and emphasis on balance, proportion, rhythm and harmony, he is not unlike the ballerino. -- Houman Barekat * The Times Literary Supplement *


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