The Book of Rude and Other Outrages
A Queer Self-Portrait
Title Details
Pages: 224
Trim size: 6.000in x 9.000in
Formats
Paperback
Pub Date: 09/01/2007
ISBN: 9-780-9785-3119-5
List Price: $16.95
Imprint
NewSouth BooksThe Book of Rude and Other Outrages
A Queer Self-Portrait
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- Description
- Reviews
The life of Stephan Sure, born John Gregory Suhor, began serenely and ended violently in New Orleans. He was both participant and voyeur in the city's middle class, upper class, and gay cultures, yet never found a true home in any of them, nor during his years in Florida, the Midwest, or his sporadic hitchhikes to nowhere. Throughout, Sure kept with him three notebooks comprising The Book of Rude: short lines ranging from insults and puns to social commentaries and cries for help. Born from these rude witticisms is this collection of poetry and short stories that in total represent the far-ranging experiences of this insightful and complicated man. His father, Charles Suhor, gathered his writings after Sure's death for this unique volume.
Sure had a terrific ear for dialogue, as well as a command of narrative mechanics and dramatic technique. Equally impressive is the variety of style and subject matter, which ranges from portraits of drunks and eccentrics to tales of sexual violence, to evocations of childhood, to imaginative fables. … And, refreshingly, Sure appears to have acquired many of his narrative sensibilities from the postwar fiction of many decades past—think Shirley Jackson and John Kennedy Toole. His work is free of the forced hipness which defines many of his contemporaries.
—American Book Review