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The Prettiest Star
The Prettiest Star
The Prettiest Star
Ebook357 pages5 hours

The Prettiest Star

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One of 2020's most acclaimed books. Winner of the Southern Book Prize • Winner of the Weatherford Award • A Kirkus Best Fiction Book of 2020 • One of O Magazine’s Best LGBT Books of 2020 •  • One of the Women's National Book Association's 2020 Great Group Reads Selections • EW's 50 Most Anticipated Books of 2020 • BookRiot • Lambda Literary's • Salon • BookPage's • Garden & Gun's • Logo NewNowNext's

In this “brutally fresh kind of homecoming novel,” (Entertainment Weekly) Brian Jackson returns to his small Appalachian hometown and the family who rejected him. Carter Sickels’s stunning literary achievement “deserves a place in the canon of AIDS literature alongside the likes of Larry Kramer and Rebecca Makkai” (Los Angeles Review of Books).

The story of Brian’s return to small-town Ohio is told in a chorus of voices: Brian’s mother Sharon; his fourteen-year-old sister, Jess, as she grapples with her brother’s mysterious return; and the video diaries Brian makes to document his final summer. Written in prose that seeks “to answer without flinching away from ugliness and without demonizing the ignorant” (Salon), The Prettiest Star offers an urgent portrait of a family in the center of a national crisis, in order to tell a unique story about the politics and fragility of the body, and to explore the bounds of family and redemption.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateApr 14, 2020
ISBN9781938235634
Author

Carter Sickels

Carter Sickels, a graduate of the MFA program at Pennsylvania State University, was awarded fellowships to Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, and the MacDowell Colony. After living for a decade in New York City, Sickels left to earn a master's degree in folklore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He now lives in Portland, Oregon.

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    The Prettiest Star - Carter Sickels

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