Stone Junction - by Jim Dodge (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

By the author of Not Fade Away and Fup, Stone Junction is a bravura act of storytelling, both a high adventure that spans the decades from Haight-Ashbury to 1980s New York, and a parable about the powers within us all.

Annalee Pearce is a pregnant 16-year-old who has been placed in a corrective centre run by nuns for refusing to co-operate with authorities. Once in there, she soon rebels, breaks a sister's jaw with a "roundhouse right" and, when her son Daniel is born, she steals away into the rain.

"Here is American storytelling as tall as it is broadly imagined and deeply felt, exuberant with outlaw humor and honest magic. Reading Stone Junction is like being at a nonstop party in celebration of everything that matters."-Thomas Pynchon

Review Quotes

"A post-psychedelic coming-of-age fable that's part Thomas Pynchon, part Tolkien, part Richard Brautigan, a story that owes as much to The Once and Future King as it does to Huckleberry Finn. Stone Junction is a rollicking, frequently surprising adventure-cum-fairy tale. It also has a sweetness about it and an indigenous American optimism, as if somewhere out there, beyond the shopping malls, Oz is waiting."-Michele Slung, New York Times Book Review

"Here is American storytelling as tall as it is broadly imagined and deeply felt, exuberant with outlaw humor and honest magic. Reading Stone Junction is like being at a nonstop party in celebration of everything that matters."--Thomas Pynchon

"The theme of a boy orphaned by fate, on a search for self-discovery, is an old one in literature. In Stone Junction, Jim Dodge has given it an imaginative, delightful and thoroughly original twist."--Tim McNulty, Seattle Times

"In Stone Junction, Dodge tackles universal themes with irrepressible vitality, boundless humor and an undiminished sense of wonder. He conveys an authentic sense of place and writes convincingly of folklore, metaphysics, mysticism and politics. He achieves a natural momentum . . . punctuated by transitions as sharp as the click of a camera shutter."--Leila R. Raim, San Francisco Chronicle

"A great storyteller. With a sense of wonder and humor, [Dodge] makes even the most implausible events seem plausible. . . . Mr. Dodge casts a spell of magic and metaphor in this celebration of absolute freedom."--Forrest Rogers, Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"Dodge's third novel may be his first cult classic."--Publishers Weekly

About the Author

Jim Dodge was born in Santa Rosa, California, in 1945, where he lived for six years until his father, a carpenter and former WWII bomber pilot, was recalled to active duty as a flight instructor during the Korean War. Jim spent an uncommonly peripatetic youth as an Air Force brat, living in Texas, Wyoming, southern California, and Labrador, where he went through puberty on Goose Bay Air Force Base. The only five girls his age within a thousand miles were madly in love with Ricky Nelson, a twisted situation that no doubt contributed to what would become a virulent antipathy for American stardom and the vast cultural commodity spectacle that serves as its bloated host.