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Riverhead Hardcover
288 pages
Product Description
<DIV><p><DIV><img src="http://us.penguingroup.com/static/pages/publishersoffice/images/icon_featuredin3.jpg"></div> </p> <b>A book of brilliant, adventurous stories from the award-winning Doug Dorst. </B><br><BR> With the publication of his debut novel, <I>Alive in Necropolis</I>, Doug Dorst was widely celebrated as one of the most creative, original literary voices of his generation-an heir to T.C. Boyle and Denis Johnson, a northern California Haruki Murakami. Now, in his second book, <I>The Surf Guru</I>, his full talent is on display, revealing an ability to explore worlds and capture characters that other writers have not yet discovered.<br><BR> In the title story, an old surfing-champion-turned-surfwear- entrepreneur sits on his ocean-front balcony watching a new generation of surfers come of age on the waves, all but one of whom wear wet suits emblazoned with the Surf Guru's name. An acid-tongued, pioneering botanist who has been exiled from the academy composes a series of scurrilous (and hilarious) biographical sketches of his colleagues and rivals, inadvertently telling his own story. A pair of twenty-first- century drifters course through a series of unusual adventures in their dilapidated car, chased west out of one town and into the next, dreaming of hitting the Pacific.<br><BR> Dorst's characters have all successfully cultivated a particular expertise, and yet they remain intent on moving toward the horizon, seeking hope in something new. Likewise, each of Dorst's stories is a virtuoso performance balancing humor and insight, achieving a perfect pitch, pulsing with a gritty and punchy, distinctly American realism- and yet always pushing on into the unexpected, taking us some place new.<BR><BR></DIV>