The Beforeland

by Corinna Vallianatos

Overview

In The Beforeland, a boy’s desperate act of rebellion against his grandmother reverberates outward, causing rifts and reckonings in the lives of others: a man fleeing his own troubled family who becomes the grandson’s unwitting accomplice; a poet struggling with the limitations of language and his wife’s distance; the proprietor of a dying motel; and the grandmother herself, who finds love for the first time as she recuperates from her injury. Set in the Mojave Desert and the suburbs of Southern California, this revelatory novel moves swiftly among characters who are caught between the deprivations of the past and the mysteries of the future. With unflinching precision, Vallianatos unearths the vulnerability and volatility at our cores.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781946724397
Publisher:	Acre Books
Publication date:	10/15/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	152
File size:	813 KB

About the Author

Corinna Vallianatos is the author of the story collection My Escapee. Her stories have appeared in Tin House, McSweeney’s, A Public Space, and elsewhere, and she is the recipient of fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She lives in Claremont, California.

Table of Contents

Title Page The Boy One Stone Jay Wilson Stone Jay The Boy Elena Wilson Elena Wilson Elena The Boy Wilson Elena Stone Jay Audrey Stone Jay Elena The Motel The Boy The Gun Two The Grandmother Three Elena Four The Boy

Editorial Reviews

Vallianatos is a genius, a mad one, and this is a wonderful, strange, violent, funny, wise book. Make some space on your bookshelf next to your Joy Williams and your Lucia Berlin. That’s rarefied literary territory, and as The Beforeland shows, Vallianatos belongs there.

Brock Clarke

"Vallianatos’s gorgeous descriptions. . . provide a dreamy quality to the windswept lives of her characters, who scheme at building something bigger for themselves. . . . Vallianatos’s haunting and precise writing captures the folly of believing in possibility in a country where capitalism is king and most are left out of its abundance."

The New York Times

The Beforeland’s effect is to contuse the seemingly firm surfaces of American life and reveal their soft tissue. Vallianatos gives us one of those rare reading experiences where we ready and brace ourselves only to be unexpectedly unnerved.

Salvador Plascencia

A miraculous novel of disparate characters who, despite shifts in time and place, belong to the same impossible landscape. There is as much meaning in the space between these narratives as there is within them.

Jessica Anthony