$19.00
By Joseph A. Boone
Paperback
"Dickens for the Civil Rights–Era South" - Los Angeles Review of Books
“With lyric beauty, welcome frankness, and rare emotional urgency, Boone reimagines Dickens’s Great Expectations in the American South, in the tumultuous 1960s, with a queer perspective and countless new and illuminating approaches. Boone’s fresh vision of the tale [is] always true to the realities of class, race, and sexuality of its milieu. Exquisite prose and a storyteller’s elan keep the story going.”--Publishers Weekly
"Furnace Creek is an ingenious re-telling and re-imagining of Dickens' 'Great Expectations.' It plays innocence against experience, youth against age, privilege against poverty, in an America of the 1960s. Its narrator is endearing and knowing and also, like a novelist, a born noticer."- Colm Tóibín, author of Brooklyn
"Boone’s prose is lyrical and inventive, merging Dickensian wit and texture with a dash of Southern gothic. Just the sort of novel with which bibliophiles will be happy to linger. A queer bildungsroman in a classic, stylish package." -Kirkus Reviews
“A playful reimagining of Dickens, a tautly plotted thriller, a beautifully observed coming of age story: Furnace Creek is a novel that is as hard to categorize as it is to put down. It seizes you in the opening chapters and refuses to let you go.” - Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Booker Prize Judge and the author of Becoming Dickens
"No single review could possibly encompass the abundance of lives and life underway in Furnace Creek—nor should anyone wish it to. That’s why we read books like this one: to get happily lost in their capacious, prodigious pages. It’s a satisfyingly substantial libation built upon a potent spirit." — Greg Bills, author of Consider This Home and Fearful Symmetry
“Joseph Boone has written a page-turning novel, a spirited American retelling of an English classic. The American South is our own Dickensian England, and Boone brings both worlds vividly alive with his ebullient prose. A joyously ambitious debut!” - Marianne Wiggins, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award nominee for Evidence of Things Unseen
“Furnace Creek is a funny, moving, and true rendition of everybody’s story: surviving our childhoods, which can be uniquely challenging if you’re Southern, and queer. Boone is a natural novelist, and Furnace Creek is a genuine accomplishment.”- Michael Cunningham, Pulitzer Prize for The Hours
“Stretching from the American South to the Ivy League and the dream of Rome and Paris, Furnace Creek is a sweeping, Gothic tale of sex, race, and a young man’s education. I was totally entertained and, most of all, seduced.”
- Viet Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize for The Sympathizer
"Furnace Creek has everything brilliant novels have: characters we love, a story that touches the reader deeply, and a haunting quality that reaches beyond the pages, informing our current lives. It is also wickedly funny, that rare novel full of charming humor and sharp cultural commentary, masterful at every turn." - Dana Johnson, Winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and author of Elsewhere, California
"The first-time novelist Joseph Allen Boone has made a debut unlike the majority of literary writers. He defies all expectations of a first-time novelist with this reader, demanding a standing ovation for his efforts. Coming of age novels are usually about the growth of the main character . . . and their circle of friends. But this coming of age is about the country as well as the young man the story follows. Topics such as race, war, religion, and the rights of marginalized peoples and gender are all masterfully explored." -Charlotte Robin Cook, Next Generation Indie Book Awards Judge
To listen to a podcast with Joseph A. Boone discussing Furnace Creek, please visit:
