- These hard-hitting, deeply felt stories trace men—straight arrows and outlaws, have-it-alls and outcasts—as they take stock of their lives and missteps and struggle to rise above their troubled pasts.
A salesman considers his tenuous relationship with his sister after she has been brutally attacked. A house painter looks forward to moving his family out of their seedy neighborhood as he plans his last bank robbery. A drifter finds a chance at love when he delivers news of a barfly's death to the man's estranged daughter.
These are hard-boiled tales of life on the edge in a city where the sun hurts your eyes and dreams die more often than they come true. Full of heart and heartbreak, Dead Boys is the debut of an astonishingly talented new writer.
Praise
- "It's violent, it's truthful, and it's devastating." —New York Times Book Review
- "The best debut collection we have read all year....You could shelve Lange between Denis Johnson, Richard Ford, and Richard Yates, and no fights would break out....Lange writes with tremendous heart, his characters' inner turmoil as rich and varied as any of the above masters. Dead Boys, we think, will live for a very long time." —E! Online
- “The comparisons with Raymond Carver and Denis Johnson are apt. Richard Lange's stories combine the truth-telling and immediacy of Carver with the casual hip of Johnson. There is a potent artistic sensibility at work here.” —T.C. Boyle
