I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son - Kent Russell.epub

From one of the most ferociously brilliant and distinctive young voices in literary nonfiction: a debut shot through with violence, comedy, and feverish intensity that takes us on an odyssey into an American netherworld, exposing a raw personal journey along the way.

Locked in battle with both his adult appetites and his most private childhood demons, Kent Russell hungers for immersive experience and revelation, and his essays take us to society’s ragged edges, the junctures between savagery and civilization. He pitches a tent at an annual four-day music festival in Illinois, among the misunderstood, thick-as-thieves fans who self-identify as Juggalos. He treks to the end of the continent to visit a legendary hockey enforcer, the granddaddy of all tough guys, to see how he’s preparing for his last foe: obsolescence. He spends a long weekend getting drunk with a self-immunizer who is willing to prove he has conditioned his body to withstand the bites of the most venomous snakes. He insinuates himself with a modern-day Robinson Crusoe on a tiny atoll off the coast of Australia. He explores the Amish obsession with baseball, and his own obsession with horror, blood, and guts. And in the piercing interstitial meditations between these essays, Russell introduces us to his own raging and inimitable forebears.

I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son, blistering and deeply personal, records Russell’s quest to understand, through his journalistic subjects, his own appetites and urges, his persistent alienation, and, above all, his knotty, volatile, vital relationship with his father. In a narrative that can be read as both a magnificent act of literary mythmaking and a howl of filial despair, Russell gives us a haunting and unforgettable portrait of an America—and a paradigm of American malehood—we have never before seen.

PRAISE
“A book of essays can be a constellation. Individual pieces shine like stars, but to see the whole project as a unified thing requires a mythology. You need faith to make out a shape around all those dots of light, to believe in the bear or the swan. The possibility of that kind of faith hovers profitably around the edges of Kent Russell’s debut,”
–Ben Greenman, The New York Times Book Review

“An exhilarating collection of essays…Russell writes in an endearing voice that can be at once wryly observant and objectively fair…What’s most impressive about this collection is the way the disparate essays cohere into a memoir-like whole.”
–Financial Times

“A surprising, beautiful book, at once tough and tender, hilarious and dark, and above all, deeply original.”
–NPR.org

“The comparison will inevitably be made, so let’s go ahead and just make it: there is certainly a bit of David Foster Wallace in Kent Russell, most certainly in the feeling that you are reading a beautiful, intricate mind.”
–Paste

“A ludicrously smart, tragicomic man-on-the-edge memoir in essays.”
–Vanity Fair

“He throws himself at their mercy, he fights for them, he admires their power, he jabs at their soft spots, he flees, he circles back. Russell’s compassion for his subjects is not blind, and he doesn’t tread lightly, but he sees them as part of his crew, and he protects them with a ferocity and camaraderie that would make anyone want Russell in their corner.”
–Catherine Carberry, The Rumpus

“At times playful and at times serious, these essays explore the author’s relationship with his father as well as masculine archetypes across the U.S. What do hockey goons and Amish baseball players have in common? What about horror films and the Insane Clown Posse? Tours of duty in Afghanistan and Daniel Boone? At a glance, these subjects are disparate and oddly matched. But in the capable hands of Kent Russell, they merge to create a portrait of contemporary American masculinity that is brazen and bleak, strange and often hilarious.”
– Minneapolis Star Tribune

"Kent Russell's essays are scary and sublime and the real real deal."
–Chad Harbach, author of The Art of Fielding

"For those of us who’ve been missing Hunter Thompson lately, good news: I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son is as close as we’re going to get to his second coming when it comes to full-on gonzo passionate observation and self-loathing transmuted into social criticism. Its larger subject is perhaps the most toxic and entertaining of all of the can-do malevolences abroad in our land – American masculinity – but its more intimate and wrenching subject is that of one father and son, similarly self-sabotaging, masters of hurtful apathy, talkers who reject the talking cure, each shipwrecked with their shame. If you’re looking for what’s funny and smart and fierce and devoted to the shrinking hope that we can all even still perhaps cultivate virtue, stop right here."
–Jim Shepard, author of the Book of Aron

"Kent Russell is one of the most excitingly gifted young non-fiction writers to have appeared in recent memory."
–John Jeremiah Sullivan, author of Pulphead