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Book Title

Freebird

Subtitle
A Novel
Author 1
Jon Raymond
Body
The Singers, an all-American family in the California style, are about to lose everything. Anne is a bureaucrat in the Los Angeles Office of Sustainability whose ideals are compromised by a proposal from a venture capitalist seeking to privatize the city’s wastewater. Her brother, Ben, a former Navy SEAL, returns from Afghanistan disillusioned and struggling with PTSD, and starts down a path toward a radical act of violence. And Anne’s teenage son, Aaron, can’t decide if he should go to college or pitch it all and hit the road. They all live inside the long shadow of Singer patriarch Grandpa Sam, whose untold experience of the Holocaust shapes his family’s moral character to the core.

Jon Raymond, screenwriter of the acclaimed films Meek’s Cutoff and Night Moves, combines these narrative threads into a hard-driving story of one family’s moral crisis. In Freebird, Raymond delivers a brilliant, searching novel about death and politics in America today, revealing how the fates of our families are irrevocably tied to the currents of history.

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List Price
$26.00
ISBN
ISBN
978-1-55597-760-3
Format
Format
Hardcover
Publication Date
Publication Date
Subject
Subject
Pages
Pages
336
Trim Size
Trim Size
6 x 9
Keynote
A page-turning new novel from the author of Livability, winner of the Oregon Book Award

About the Author

Jon  Raymond
Credit: Michael Palmieri
Jon Raymond is the author of the novels Freebird,Rain Dragon, and The Half-Life, a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2004, and the short-story collection Livability, a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers selection and winner of the Oregon Book Award. He is also the screenwriter of the film Meek’s Cutoff and cowriter of the films Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy, both based on his short fiction, and the film Night Moves. He cowrote the HBO miniseries Mildred Pierce, winner of five Emmy Awards. Raymond’s writing has appeared in Tin House, the Village Voice, Bookforum, Artforum, and other publications. He lives in Portland, Oregon.
 
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Praise

  • “Raymond rotates between Anne’s, Ben’s and Aaron’s points of view, his gallows humor and psychological acuity informing the action of every character. . . . His descriptive powers. . . pull you into a kind of sensuous ambiguity that’s as seductive for the reader as it is for his characters. . . . The biggest impression the book leaves is of a novelist reaching the height of his powers.”The Oregonian
  • “[Freebird is] the rare work of fiction that feels more timely with each passing moment.”Seattle Weekly
  • “A binge-worthy novel, lightly satirical and compulsively readable.”Shelf Awareness
  • “The arrival of Freebird requires that you set aside all New Year plans and dive in without delay. . . . A darkly relatable amorality tale from a skilled storyteller.”Portland Monthly
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