Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
If I Don't Six

If I Don't Six

Reid, Elwood

Paperback

General Fiction

ISBN10: 0385491204
ISBN13: 9780385491204
Publisher: Anchor Books
Published: Aug 17 1999
Pages: 272
Weight: 0.52
Height: 0.80 Width: 5.23 Depth: 8.02
Language: English
Elwood Reid first appeared on the literary stage with a powerful and bruising story called What Salmon Know, which appeared in the March 1997 issue of GQ. Here was a writer not afraid to examine the soulful underside of the American male, or the violence that accompanies disappointed dreams. Now, in his first, extraordinary novel, Reid tells the story of Elwood Riley, a six-foot-six, 275-pound blue-collar kid whose ticket out of Cleveland is a full ride football scholarship to the University of Michigan.

But Riley is cursed with intelligence and an awareness of the vicious inhumanity of the college football system. If Riley doesn't want to six--lose his scholarship or get maimed--he has to become a fella, a pain-loving freak too nihilistic to care what he does to himself or others. And after Riley encounters the alluring, mysteriously damaged Kate, his dilemma becomes ever more painful.

Elwood Reid's portrait of this world is at once blackly humorous, starkly tragic, and perfectly detailed. With deft strokes, he portrays emotionally stunted coaches who have mastered the art of humiliating and manipulating young men, groupies attracted to the fame but undone by the shocking cruelty of the players, and the athletes themselves, who grow addicted to violence, alcohol, and steroids, too caught up in the glory of playing for Big Blue to notice they are mere meat to the coaches and the university.

In tough, spare, beautiful prose that should invite comparisons to the works of Thom Jones and Denis Johnson, Reid describes a place where young men damage their souls and their bodies in pursuit of a worthless glamor. This is a profound, unsettling book about a familiar yet hidden world--a Greek tragedy in cleats.

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