October 2010
14 posts
From Booklist
“Midwesterner Charles moved to New York City in 1998, where he rented a squalid Brooklyn apartment with old friends from Michigan and worked a temp job. Broke and homesick, Charles relays both his ambition to make a living by writing and his increasing sense of isolation within the hustle and bustle of the Big Apple. Then he lands a lucrative job as a financial writer at Morgan Stanley in...
The Kalamazoo Gazette on THERE'S A ROAD: "Easily... →
Charles’ memoir will pull, push and coax you down the road of a lost pilgrim from Kalamazoo using humor, love and loss to find a place in a broken world.
Read the full review.
“Part of me dug this wild new scene. I liked getting up early, putting on a shirt...”
– THERE’S A ROAD excerpted in HTML Giant
From the New York Observer Fall Books Preview
“Mr. Charles moved from to New York to become a writer, but on Sept. 11, 2001, he found himself an office worker for Morgan Stanley in the World Trade Center. A novelist and music writer, Mr. Charles here mines a genre (the Midwesterner adrift in the city) perennial to our literature since F. Scott Fitzgerald, who never had to deal with falling towers.”
something
is working toward you
right now, and
I mean you
and nobody but
you.
—Charles Bukowski,
“relentless as the tarantula”
From Library Journal
“This is the book I can’t forget…Full of insightful, transcendent regular-guy moments and bad decisions, it didn’t make me like the author, but it knocked me on my ass.”
—Library Journal (starred review)
Michael Chabon on There's a Road to Everywhere...
“A sneakily disturbing, disarmingly profound, casually devastating memoir, taut and adept, that cracked me up even at its saddest moments, and broke my heart almost without my quite noticing.”
—Michael Chabon, author of MANHOOD FOR AMATEURS and THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER & CLAY
Rachel Sherman on There's a Road to Everywhere...
“With ease and humor, Bryan Charles does what all writers aspire to do: he shows us the familiar in a whole new way. His beautiful, often painful, honesty makes the inside of his head a fascinating place to be.”
—Rachel Sherman, author of THE FIRST HURT and LIVING ROOM
Scott Smith on There's a Road to Everywhere Except...
“An astonishingly honest account of what it means to be young and ambitious and just self-aware enough to know that whatever you’ve managed to drag into the light about yourself will never be enough to save you from all that remains in darkness. There’s a lot of pain in this account of misdeeds and misadventures on the road toward what could almost—God forbid—be called maturity, but the pain...
Joan Silber on There's a Road to Everywhere Except...
“Honest and unembellished, THERE’S A ROAD TO EVERYWHERE EXCEPT WHERE YOU CAME FROM is a forthright portrait of the exact spot where the life of one young writer in New York intersects with history. A fresh vision of how the familiar becomes the unbelievable.”
—Joan Silber, author of THE SIZE OF THE WORLD and IDEAS OF HEAVEN
