Mr. Bones (Twenty Stories)

“Suave and accomplished . . . [The stories] are unsettling, resistant to tidy denouement and faintly misanthropic.” — Washington Post
 
“Beneath the deceptive elegance of these stories, land mines lurk, and Theroux detonates them with gusto.” — O, the Oprah Magazine
 
A family watches their patriarch transform into the singing, wisecracking lead of an old-timey minstrel show. An art collector publicly destroys his most valuable pieces. Two boys stand by as their father wages war on the raccoons living under their house. In this new collection, acclaimed author Paul Theroux shows us humanity possessed, consumed by compulsive desire, always with his carefully honed eye for detail and the subtle idiosyncrasies that bring his characters to life. Searing, dark, and sure to unsettle, Mr. Bones is a stunning display of Theroux’s “fluent, faintly sinister powers of vision and imagination” (The New Yorker).
 
“Fans of Theroux’s fiction will be pleased to observe, in the twenty stories collected in Mr. Bones, clear evidence of how little he has mellowed over time . . . Mr. Bones is a series of characteristically dark and sharply focused snapshots from the world that Paul Theroux has observed—and invented.”  — Francine Prose, New York Times Book Review