#4 on The New York Times’ list of The 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years
The New York Times bestselling, hilarious tale of a hardscrabble Texas childhood that Oprah.com calls the best memoir of a generation
“Wickedly funny and always movingly illuminating, thanks to kick-ass storytelling and a poet’s ear.” —Oprah.comThe Liars’ Club took the world by storm and raised the art of the memoir to an entirely new level, bringing about a dramatic revival of the form. Karr’s comic childhood in an east Texas oil town brings us characters as darkly hilarious as any of J. D. Salinger’s—a hard-drinking daddy, a sister who can talk down the sheriff at age twelve, and an oft-married mother whose accumulated secrets threaten to destroy them all. This unsentimental and profoundly moving account of an apocalyptic childhood is as “funny, lively, and un-put-downable” (
USA Today) today as it ever was.
On sale: May 31, 2005
Page count: 352 Pages
ISBN: 9780143035749
Mary Karr kick-started a memoir revolution with
The Liars' Club, which was a
New York Times bestseller for over a year, a best book of the year for
The New York Times Book Review,
The New Yorker,
People and
Time, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the winner of prizes from PEN and the Texas Institute of Letters. Karr has won the Whiting Award, Radcliffe's Bunting Fellowship, and Pushcart Prizes for both verse and essays, and she has been a Guggenheim Fellow in poetry. Her other bestselling books include
The Art of Memoir, the memoirs
Lit and
Cherry, and the poetry collection
Sinners Welcome,
Viper Rum,
The Devil's Tour, and
Abacus. The Peck Professor of Literature at Syracuse University, Karr lives in New York City.
"The essential American story ... a beauty." —
Jonathan Yardley,
The Washington Post Book World"Astonishing ... one of the most dazzling and moving memoirs to come along in years." —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
"This book is so good I thought about sending it out for a backup opinion...it's like finding Beethoven in Hoboken. To have a poet's precision of language and a poet's insight into people applied to one of the roughest, toughest, ugliest places in America is an astonishing event." —Molly Ivins, The Nation
"9mm humor, gothic wit, and a stunning clarity of memory within a poet's vision.... Karr's unerring scrutiny of her childhood delivers a story confoundingly real." —The Boston Sunday Globe
"Overflows with sparkling wit and humor.... Truth beats powerfully at the heart of this dazzling memoir." —San Francisco Chronicle
