Fool (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries) - Softcover

Dillen, Frederick

3.17

123 ratings by Goodreads

9781612183688: Fool (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1612183689 ISBN 13: 9781612183688

Publisher: AmazonEncore, 2012

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Self-absorbed Barnaby Griswold has to lose it all—money, homes, and family—before he gets a shot at becoming the unlikely hero of his own life.

Griswold is indisputably a fool. A well-educated, well-connected investments player on the one hand, but an entitled money-driven cretin on the other. His life changes almost overnight when he’s found to have acted slimily (but not illegally) by selling a stock short. His wife deserts him, his daughters disown him, and he loses his final and favorite home. At forty-six, disgraced and broke and lonely, Barnaby must repair his life to find redemption. Out of print for more than a decade, Frederick G. Dillen’s comic (and now timely) novel about an unlikely hero is now being reissued as part of librarian and NPR commentator Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries series.

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From the Back Cover:

Early praise for FOOL:

"This novel brims with love of the human soul's possibilities for hope and joy and love and resilience and failure. Dillen writes with the excitement and curiosity of a child and the wisdom and talent of a master. Fool is romantic, funny, sad, sometimes violent, and absolutely serious. Dillen is a unique writer, you won't read anyone else like him."--Andre Dubus

"As compelling as a romping game of tennis."--Booklist

An "assured and sophisticated novel."--Publishers Weekly

"Dillen's prose is astonishing."--Library Journal

Praise for Frederick G. Dillen's Hero:

"Not just poignant and charming but impressively realized as well."--The Times Literary Supplement

"Completely engrossing."--The Boston Globe

"Brilliant."--The Times-Picayune (New Orleans)

"In a busy field of excellent first novels, any number of them first-rate by all the usual standards, Frederick G. Dillen's Hero stand out...this small and powerful story is also strangely beautiful and deeply touching. Hero is an experience, real enough to become a memory."--Dictionary of Literary Biography on Awarding Hero its First-Novel Prize

From the Inside Flap:

Barnaby Griswold has never been much of an athlete, or even very sportsmanlike; he tends to cheat when the match is on the line. He's not much of a fighter either, more likely to throw a rock than an honest punch.

His father had hoped Barnaby might lead a life of dim propriety. But instead Barnaby has grown into his father's horror: a great melon of impropriety, a fluffmeister, an investments player with unbelievably priceless instincts for the next deal.

Then he loses everything. Not just his wife and daughters. Not just his livelihood and connections and lunches at La Cote. Barnaby, without a nickel, is banished even from his boyhood summer home, the very last roof over his head.

Now, divorced, deserted, flat broke, Barnaby has to find a way to repair his life.

Can a fool--a clumsy, self-absorbed, insensitive, money-driven fool--become a hero, the kind of hero that makes us stand up and cheer? In a word, yes.

This is a funny, irresistible, resonant novel that, in Andre Dubus's words, "brims with love."

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