Background
He was born in San Antonio, Texas, but grew up in North Carolina.
(This collection of stories, set in various locales of Nor...)
This collection of stories, set in various locales of North Carolina create entire worlds and indelible moments as only the best short fiction does.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0316199494/?tag=2022091-20
1997
(Both delightful and wise, Jim the Boy brilliantly capture...)
Both delightful and wise, Jim the Boy brilliantly captures the pleasures and fears of youth at a time when America itself was young and struggling to come into its own.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0316198951/?tag=2022091-20
2001
(This is the book that in hardcover won unanimous praise f...)
This is the book that in hardcover won unanimous praise from reviewers, who called it "beautiful and transcendent" (The Boston Globe), a book that "measures the arc of a culture's mortality in small, personal increments" (Star Tribune, Minneapolis), is written "in a poker-faced style that always seems on the verge of exploding into manic laughter or howls of pain" (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution). They're right. Tony Earley is a writer so good at his craft that you don't read his words so much as inhale them. His first book of nonfiction is one of those unexpected classics, like Ann Lamott's Traveling Mercies, in which a great writer rips open his/her heart and takes the reader inside for a no-holds-barred tour. In a prose style that is deceptively simple, Earley confronts the big things-God, death, civilization, family, his own clinical depression-with wit and grace, without looking away or smirking. This is the book that in hardcover won unanimous praise from reviewers, who called it "beautiful and transcendent" (The Boston Globe), a book that "measures the arc of a culture's mortality in small, personal increments" (Star Tribune, Minneapolis), is written "in a poker-faced style that always seems on the verge of exploding into manic laughter or howls of pain" (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution). They're right. Tony Earley is a writer so good at his craft that you don't read his words so much as inhale them. His first book of nonfiction is one of those unexpected classics, like Ann Lamott's Traveling Mercies, in which a great writer rips open his/her heart and takes the reader inside for a no-holds-barred tour. In a prose style that is deceptively simple, Earley confronts the big things-God, death, civilization, family, his own clinical depression-with wit and grace, without looking away or smirking.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1565123026/?tag=2022091-20
2001
(Seven years ago, readers everywhere fell in love with Jim...)
Seven years ago, readers everywhere fell in love with Jim Glass, the precocious ten-year-old at the heart of Tony Earley's bestseller Jim the Boy. Now a teenager, Jim returns in another tender and wise story of young love on the eve of World War Two. Jim Glass has fallen in love, as only a teenage boy can fall in love, with his classmate Chrissie Steppe. Unfortunately, Chrissie is Bucky Bucklaw's girlfriend, and Bucky has joined the Navy on the eve of war. Jim vows to win Chrissie's heart in his absence, but the war makes high school less than a safe haven, and gives a young man's emotions a grown man's gravity. With the uncanny insight into the well-intentioned heart that made Jim the Boy a favorite novel for thousands of readers, Tony Earley has fashioned another nuanced and unforgettable portrait of America in another time--making it again even realer than our own day. This is a timeless and moving story of discovery, loss and growing up, proving why Tony Earley's writing "radiates with a largeness of heart" (Esquire).
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0316008052/?tag=2022091-20
2009
(A Washington Post Top 50 Fiction Book for 2014 Frank O'Co...)
A Washington Post Top 50 Fiction Book for 2014 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award finalist In Mr.Tall, his first story collection in two decades, Tony Earley brings us seven rueful, bittersweet, riotous studies of characters both ordinary and mythical, seeking to make sense of the world transforming around them. He demonstrates once again the prodigious storytelling gifts that have made him one of the most accomplished writers of his generation. In the title story, a lonely young bride terrifyingly shares a remote mountain valley with a larger-than-life neighbor, while the grieving widow of "The Cryptozoologist" is sure she's been visited by a Southern variant of Bigfoot. "Have You Seen the Stolen Girl?" introduces us to the ghost of Jesse James, who plagues an elderly woman in the wake of a neighborhood girl's abduction. In "Haunted Castles of the Barrier Islands" a newly empty-nest couple stumbles through an impenetrable Outer Banks fog seeking a new life to replace the one they have lost, while "Yard Art" follows the estranged wife of a famous country singer as she searches for an undiscovered statue by an enigmatic artist. In the concluding novella, "Jack and the Mad Dog," we find Jack-the giant killer of the stories-in full flight from threats both canine and existential. Earley indelibly maps previously undiscovered territories of the human heart in these melancholy, comic, and occasionally strange stories. Along the way he leads us on a journey from contemporary Nashville to a fantastical land of talking dogs and flying trees, teaching us at every step that, even in the most familiar locales, the ordinary is never just that.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/031624614X/?tag=2022091-20
2015
He was born in San Antonio, Texas, but grew up in North Carolina.
Earley studied English at Warren Wilson College. He also graduated from University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa.
After graduation in 1983, Tony spent four years as a reporter in North Carolina, first as a general assignment reporter for The Thermal Belt News-Journal in Columbus, and then as sports editor and feature writer at The Daily Courier in Forest City. He quickly found success writing short stories, first with smaller literary magazines, then with Harper's, which published two of his stories: "Charlotte" in 1992 and "The Prophet From Jupiter" in 1993. Since 1990 he works as a freelance writer. He is also the Samuel Milton Fleming Professor of English at Vanderbilt University.
The latter story helped Harper's win a National Magazine Award for fiction in 1994.
In 1996, Earley's short stories earned him a place on Granta's list of the "20 Best Young American Novelists", and shortly after that announcement, The New Yorker featured him in an issue that focused on the best new novelists in America. He has twice been included in the annual Best American Short Stories anthology. His writing style has been compared by critics to writers as distant as a young Ernest Hemingway and E. B. White.
On May 15, 2010 Earley gave a humorous commencement speech at Warren Wilson College. He was inducted into the Fellowship of Southern Writers in 2010.
(This is the book that in hardcover won unanimous praise f...)
2001(Both delightful and wise, Jim the Boy brilliantly capture...)
2001(This collection of stories, set in various locales of Nor...)
1997(Seven years ago, readers everywhere fell in love with Jim...)
2009(A Washington Post Top 50 Fiction Book for 2014 Frank O'Co...)
2015Quotations: Writers do not write about a place because they belong there, but because they want to.
Tony lives with his wife and two daughters.
