Benjamin Percy

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Esquire Exclusive Excerpt

Posted on April 10, 2013 by ben

The May issue of Esquire features an excerpt — culled from the first 200 pages of Red Moon — called “The Infected.” You can read it online or listen to the audiobook version here.

"Benjamin Percy is one of the most gifted and versatile writers to appear in American publishing in years...His prose has the masculine power of Ernest Hemingway's, but also the sensibilities and compassion of Eudora Welty. His writing is like a meeting of Shakespeare and rock 'n' roll. Benjamin Percy knows how to keep it in E-major, and what a ride it is."

James Lee Burke, bestselling author of Feast Day of Fools, Heaven's Prisoners, and Neon Rain.

Praise

Chosen by the Powells Bookstore chain for their “Indiespensible” Books Subscription Club

The Young Adult Round Table (YART) of the Texas Library Association (TLA) named Refresh Refresh a A Texas Maverick Graphic Novel.

Chosen as “Book of the Week” at iBooks (10/27/10-11/2/10)

With RED MOON one of our most blazingly gifted young writers stakes his claim to national attention. Benjamin Percy has one great advantage over most writers who attempt “literary horror”: he understands the literature of real horror from the inside out, and he speaks it like a native. This is a novel with the power to thrill and transport, also to lead the reader well out of her comfort zone and into emotional territory few people have ever seen.

Peter Straub, bestselling author, Ghost Story, Kokoand The Talisman

I admire the work of Benjamin Percy for its sheer ferocity and compassion, for its deep empathy for people at the hard edges of rage and grief and fear. The stories in Refresh, Refresh are big-hearted and drunk and dangerous, and there’s a heightened, unnerving vibe as you travel through Percy’s world. You never know where you will end up at the close of a Percy story, but you can be sure that he’ll actually take you somewhere.

Dan Chaon, Author, Among the Missing and You Remind MeMe

Named a Most Anticipated SFF Fiction Book by New Scientist, Gizmodo, Vol 1 Brooklyn, the A.V. Club, and Tor.com

New Scientist

The Wilding is one of the best novels published this fall, and if you haven’t read Percy before, it’s the perfect introduction to a remarkable American voice.

Powells.com

There’s no other way to say it: Ben Percy has written a stunner, a genre-bending novel of suspense and terror but with Percy’s usual force-of-nature language and his deep insights into character. I cannot recommend this novel highly enough, nor could I put it down.

Tom Franklin, author of Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, Hell at the Breech and Poachers.

Listed as one of the Top 100 Books of the Year by the Kansas City Star

A Library Media Connection ‘Best of the Best’ for 2009

“Take one part dystopia, one part sci-fi, two parts apocalypse, then ride them roughshod through a bleak and bloody western, and it still wouldn’t get close to what Ben Percy does here, which is blow open the core of humanity’s dark heart.” -Marlon James, Booker Prize award-winning author of Black Leopard, Red Wolf

Comet Cycle - James

REFRESH, REFRESH is full of bravery and bravado, and it fairly crackles with life. These stories mark the beginning of what is bound to be a long and brilliant career for Benjamin Percy. Welcome him.

Ann Patchett, New York Times-bestselling and PEN/Faulkner Award-winning Author, Truth and Beauty, Bel Cantoand The Magician's Assistant

Named by Young Adult Library Services Association (YALS) as a Great Graphic Novel

“When Benjamin Percy publishes a novel, I have got to read that novel. The Ninth Metal continues his streak of thrilling, incisive genre bending goodness. It’s a sci-fi novel, a crime novel and a super-hero novel, too. Audacious and intelligent and exactly what I was dying to read.” -Victor LaValle, author of The Changeling

Comet Cycle - LaValle

Not your father’s eco-novel. In compelling, image-driven prose, Ben Percy confounds the old polarities about wilderness and development by sending three generations of men into a doomed canyon, and letting so much hell break lose we can’t tell the heros from the villians–which feels exactly right. This is a dark, sly, honest, pleasing, slip-under-your-skin-and-stay-there kind of a book.

Pam Houston, bestselling authorCowboys are My Weakness and Sighthound

The Wilding is a compelling action narrative, universal in its dimensions while utterly grounded in specific particulars. Ben Percy is a stunning storyteller. His fearful wildernesses, both physical and psychic, kept me up through the night.

William Kittredge, authorHole in the Sky and The Willow Field

Benjamin Percy’s The Wilding is a tour de force meditation and treatise on the nature of violence, the violence of nature, man in the wild, and the wild in man—cleverly disguised as a page-turning adventure. Not just a “must” read, but a need read, this book is timely, terrifying, terrific.

Antonya Nelson, author, In the LandMen and Female Trouble

The Dead Lands is a bomb-blast of a novel, casting its tremors in every direction. Benjamin Percy’s range grows broader with every book he writes. Here he takes a journey across a cataclysmic future American West, sending his band of seekers, scholars, assassins, and explorers through a landscape as dangerous and surreal as it must have seemed to the original Lewis and Clark. Their adventure, like the novel itself, travels far past the frontier, into the deepest and most thrilling of wildernesse… Read more

Kevin Brockmeier, author of The Brief History of the Dead and The Illumination

Benjamin Percy is interested in grace, transcendence, the sudden moments in lives when a glow of feeling appears, brightens the chasm, goes dark again, or doesn’t. He has a fabulous eye for detail, the names of things, weeds, weapons, machines, and renders superbly the revelatory shadings of character. In REFRESH, REFRESH he is unafraid of story, plot, and writes of plain lives in crisis without blinking, in sinewy, rippling prose, the rhythms of his sentences ever taking us more deeply inside.… Read more

Daniel Woodrell, Pen/West Award-winning Author, Tomato Red, Winter's Bone, and The DeathSweet Mister

Percy’s writing in this novel is recklessly passionate, ferocious and fast-paced, but his thinking about these subjects is profound and carefully reasoned.

Hayden's Ferry Review

Refresh, Refresh is a completely impressive collection of short fiction by one of our most accomplished younger writers. Benjamin Percy moves instinctively toward the molten center of contemporary writing, the place where genre fiction, in this case horror, overflows its boundaries and becomes something dark and grand and percipient. These stories contain a brutal power and are radiant with pain — only a writer of surpassing honesty and directness could lead us here. Ben Percy’s feet are firmly… Read more

Peter Straub, New York Times-bestselling and Bram Stoker Award-winning Author, In the Night Room, Lost Boy, Lost Girl, Ghost Storyand Koko

Percy’s novel perfectly captures our ambiguous attitudes toward the natural world, the tensions between rural and urban, the way that untamed wildness carries both grace and terror.

High Country News

…his writing is as natural, dark, and deep as the woods he writes about. At 31, Percy is as promising a writer as anyone on a certain New York magazine’s list of promising writers under 40.

The Boston Globe

There are a hundred ways to feel frightened and lost in a forest, and the excellent, savvy Benjamin Percy can evoke them all. THE WILDING, a brilliant literary novel that feels at times almost like Geoffrey Household’s classic Rogue Male, seems to have been written on his vibrating nerve-endings. This book is filled with dread, sadness, tension and a tireless vision of mankind’s thoughtless devastation of an ancient and more authentic way of life. It is almost impossible to put down. James Dicke… Read more

Peter Straub, bestselling author, Ghost Story, A Dark Matterand Shadowland

Listed as one of the Top Ten Books of 2010 by New West Magazine

Bio
▼
- Interviews
- Recognition
Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction
▼
- …at indiebound
- …at Amazon
Novels
▼
Comics
▼
Film/TV/Podcasts
Other Works
▼
Contact
▼
- Appearances