We the Animals

Justin Torres was born in 1980 and grew up in upstate New York. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, and Glimmer Train. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, a recipient of the Rolon United States Artist Fellowship in Literature, and is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.

""We the Animals" is a dark jewel of a book. It's heartbreaking. It's beautiful. It resembles no other book I've read. We should all be grateful for Justin Torres, a brilliant, ferocious new voice."--Michael Cunningham "The best book you'll read this fall..."We the Animals," a slim novel--just 144 pages--about three brothers, half white, half Puerto Rican, scrambling their way through a dysfunctional childhood, is the kind of book that makes a career....Torres's sentences are gymnastic, leaping and twirling, but never fancy for the sake of fancy, always justified by the ferocity and heartbreak and hunger and slap-happy euphoria of these three boys. It's a coming-of-age novel set in upstate New York that rumbles with lyric dynamite. It's a knock to the head that will leave your mouth agape. Torres is a savage new talent."--"Esquire" "First-time novelist Justin Torres unleashes "We the Animals" (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), a gorgeous, howling coming-of-age novel that will devour your heart."--"Vanity Fair " "A novel so honest, poetic, and tough that it makes you reexamine what it means to love and to hurt. Written in the voice of the youngest of three boys, this partly autobiographical tale evokes the cacophony of a messy childhood--flying trash-bag kites, ransacking vegetable gardens, and smashing tomatoes until pulp runs down the kitchen walls. But despite the din the brothers create, the novel belongs to their mother, who alternates between gruff and matter-of-fact--'loving big boys is different from loving little boys--you've got to meet tough with tough.' In stark prose, Torres shows us how one family grapples with a dangerous and chaotic love for each other, as well as what it means to become a man."--"O, the Oprah Magazine" "The imagistic power of Justin Torres' debut, "We the Animals" (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), exists in inverse proportion to its slim 128 pages. Just try shaking off this novel about three upstate New York brothers whose knock