From Malcolm Jones, one of our most astute cultural observers, comes Little Boy Blues, a “warmly elegant” (O, the Oprah Magazine) and piercing memoir about a family’s breakup and the need simultaneously to embrace and distance ourselves from the people and events that shape us. Now on sale from Pantheon Books.
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Praise for Little Boy Blues
“Malcolm Jones’s memoir is beautifully written and heartfelt. His clear-eyed view of growing up in the South and his honest look at the complexities of familial love will leave few readers unmoved.” —George Pelecanos
“Malcolm Jones describes his Southern childhood without bathos and with elegant restraint, reminding me a little of the delayed and muffled detonations in Joyce’s “The Dead.” —Sally Mann
“Little Boy Blues is an extraordinary memoir with the compelling intimacy and frankness of a late-night conversation. In a narrative that is singularly clear and forthright, Malcolm Jones makes the reader feel the powerful bond that grows between his mother and her son during the frequent absences of his handsome, charming, and childish father . . . . It is a wonderful book.” —Eric Kraft
“With affectionate regard, Little Boy Blues captures the minutiae of a world far removed—Mason jars with lightning bugs, the delivery of a piano, the caustics of Christian catechism. Jones chronicles one family’s sleepwalk out of the Eisenhower era into the fast forward jump-cut dynamics of an integrated South. This is a story epic in its intimacies.” —Van Dyke Parks
“Fragrant with wistfulness and poignant with regret.” —Kirkus