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Sign up todayThe Beautiful Miscellaneous
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Learn moreFrom the critically acclaimed award-winning author of The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre comes this moving story of a boy trapped in the shadow of his father's genius.
Nathan Nelson is the ordinary son of a brilliant physicist. From an early age, his father has doggedly prodded him toward greatness, enrolling him in whiz kid summer camps and teaching him college algebra. By the time Nathan is seventeen, hopes for a late-blooming prodigy seem dashed. Then, in the summer of 1987, everything changes. A tragic accident and ensuing coma leave Nathan with a profoundly altered mind that allows him to memorize vast amounts of information. Nathan's father, seeking an application for the new talent, sends him to a research institute where, amid misfits and savants, Nathan tries to find a purpose for the new way he perceives the world.
Dominic Smith is the author of The Beautiful Miscellaneous. He is a former recipient of the Dobie Paisano Fellowship from the Texas Institute of Letters. His fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in the Atlantic Monthly. He grew up in Australia and now lives in Austin, Texas, where he received an MFA from the James A. Michener Center for Writers.
Richard Powers has published thirteen novels. He is a MacArthur Fellow and received the National Book Award. His book, The Overstory, won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction.
Reviews
“With an exquisite ear not just for language but for emotional truth as well, Dominic Smith has written an ambitious and strikingly unusual tale about what it’s like to grow up in the shadow of a brilliant father and under the force of his expectations. I finished this book in awe of Smith’s imagination—and of his enormous heart.”
“[Smith] conjures Nathan’s colorful, mysterious new existence with vivid detail. The real story in this touching, gracefully wrought novel lies around the edges of the plot. It is really about the weight of family dreams and expectations.”
“Fantastic…an utterly fresh look at how a child can grow beyond parental expectations and find the genius of being himself.”
“Garcia, a stage actor by training, treats Smith’s novel as an extended monologue to be performed, summoning the moods and sensations of its prose via subtle shifts of emphasis. The result is a performance-driven audiobook, rendered in minimalist fashion.”
“This unusual, gorgeously written novel is filled with pleasures.”
“[A] finely modulated second novel…a luminous addition to novels about fathers and sons.”
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