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Start giftingThe Car Thief
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Learn moreDescribed as "one of the best coming-of-age novels of the twentieth century," Theodore Weesner's modern American classic is now on audio!
It's 1959. Sixteen-year-old Alex Housman has just stolen his fourteenth car and frankly doesn't know why. His divorced, working-class father grinds out the night shift at the local Chevy plant in Detroit and looks forward to the flask in his glove compartment and the open bottles of booze in his Flint, Michigan, home. Broke and fighting to survive, Alex and his father face the realities of estrangement, incarceration, and even violence as their lives unfold toward the climactic episode that a New York Times reviewer called "one of the most profoundly powerful in American fiction."
In this rich, beautifully crafted story, Weesner has written a transcendent piece of literature in deceptively simple language, painting a powerful portrait of a father and a son otherwise invisible among the mundane, everyday details of life in blue-collar America. It is a true and enduring American classic.
Theodore Weesner, born in Flint, Michigan, is aptly described as a “writers’ writer” by the larger literary community. His short works have been published in the New Yorker, Esquire, the Saturday Evening Post, the Atlantic, and Best American Short Stories. His novels—including The True Detective, Winning the City, and Harbor Lights—have been published to great critical acclaim in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Harper’s, the Boston Globe, USA Today, the Chicago Tribune, Boston magazine, and the Los Angeles Times, to name a few. He lives and works in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
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
“A remarkable, gripping first novel.”
“One of the great coming-of-age novels of the twentieth century…Ted Weesner’s seminal novel demands a second look for its marvelously rendered young protagonist, the unforgettable Alex Housman; for its courage and wisdom and great good heart.”
“What The Car Thief is really concerned with emerges between its realistic lines—slowly, delicately, with consummate art. Perhaps Mr. Weesner himself put it best: ‘In my work, I guess I wish for nothing so much as to get close enough to things to feel their heart and warmth and pain, and in that way appreciate them a little more.’ Judging from this book, his wish has been fulfilled…and then some.”
“Weesner lays out a subtle and complex case study of juvenile delinquency that wrenches the heart. The novel reminds me strongly of the poignant aimlessness of Truffaut’s The 400 Blows. Beneath its quiet surface, The Car Thief—like its protagonist—possesses churning emotions that push up through the prose for resolution. Weesner is definitely a man to watch—and read.”
“The Car Thief is a poignant and beautifully written novel, so true and so excruciatingly painful that one can’t read it without feeling the knife’s cruel blade in the heart.”
“A simply marvelous novel. Alex (the protagonist) emerges from it as a kind of blue-collar Holden Caulfield.”
“Weesner’s perfectly restrained and subtle exploration of the characters’ painful and often difficult emotions caused me to have an intimate and emotional connection to a character and story of such a seemingly distant world. It taught me that even the most personal of stories can be universal and it is with this belief that I have adapted The Car Thief into what I hope will be a film that does some justice to the most beautiful novel that ever broke my heart.”
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