Dark, profane, and hilarious, yet ultimately humane, these ten stories are the latest and best of Robin McLean’s reports from the eternal battlefront that is the United States.
Ranging across the continent, from Alaska to Missouri, from the flatlands to the mountains, each tale is a snapshot of the political, racial, and sexual undercurrents roiling contemporary life, and each finds a way into the nerves and blood that pulse beneath the question of how to live a decent life.
Here you’ll find stolen children living life to the fullest on the run and on the road, soldiers guarding empty frontiers, and rugged individualists brought low by an uncaring nature. You’ll find prehistoric beasts rubbing talons with hustlers, as well as death machines lurking beneath the bucolic countryside. Here you’ll find hatred, friendship, and pitch-black humor all seething in the same stew.
Get ’em Young, Treat ’em Tough, Tell ’em Nothing marries the sardonic moral and political explorations of a Flannery O’Connor to the surreal, scuzzy wit of a Denis Johnson. It is a brazen State of the Union for a nation on the edge.
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“Graham and Amoss capture the dreamlike aspects of the stories and transform them into engrossing performances. Characters crackle with life, while the unusual elements of the stories…sound both real and unreal.”
— AudioFile
“Grotesque, comic, and unsettling.”
— The Guardian (London)“In Robin McLean’s stories, life is tough but so are the living…Everyone here is on the edge of some kind of cliff, and McLean unsentimentally renders their various precipices with incredible energy and humor.”
— New York Times“Sharp, noirish, thought-provoking stories of lives out of joint.”
— Kirkus Reviews“Offers up a gritty and well-honed collection of mischief, desperation, and disaster in the American West…with merciless prose and a bold vision.”
— Publishers Weekly“No writer casts a sharper light on the feral edges of the human condition than Robin McLean.”
— John Larison, author of Whiskey When We’re Dry“These tales are so surprisingly original, so strange and moving, so funny, so irreverent, I swallowed them, I ate them whole.”
— Deb Olin Unferth, author of Barn 8“Not since Jesus’ Son have I read a book of stories that so resonated in my soul. McLean’s prose sings with a fierceness that is ornate and sparse, spiritual and secular, peaceful and violent.”
— Christian Kiefer, author of The AnimalsBe the first to write a review about this audiobook!
Robin McLean worked as lawyer and then a potter for fifteen years in the woods of Alaska before receiving her MFA at UMass Amherst. Her story collection Reptile House won the 2013 BOA Editions Fiction Prize and was twice a finalist for the Flannery O’Connor Short Story Prize.
Dion Graham is an award-winning narrator named a “Golden Voice” by AudioFile magazine. He has been a recipient of the prestigious Audie Award numerous times, as well as Earphones Awards, the Publishers Weekly Listen Up Awards, IBPA Ben Franklin Awards, and the ALA Odyssey Award. He was nominated in 2015 for a Voice Arts Award for Outstanding Narration. He is also a critically acclaimed actor who has performed on Broadway, off Broadway, internationally, in films, and in several hit television series. He is a graduate of Rutgers University’s Mason Gross School of the Arts, with an MFA degree in acting.