Tongues of Angels - by Reynolds Price (Paperback)

About the Book

The award-winning and best-selling author tells the story of an artist who contemplates what he has gained -- and lost -- on the road to maturity.

Book Synopsis

"I'm as peaceful a man as you're likely to meet in America now, but this is about a death I may have caused. Not slowly over time by abuse or meanness but on a certain day and by ignorance, by plain lack of notice. Though it happened thirty-four years ago, and though I can't say it's haunted my mind that many nights lately, I suspect I can draw it out for you now, clear as this noon. I may need to try."
Set in a summer camp in the Blue Ridge Mountains during the deceptively tranquil 1950s, The Tongues of Angels is a story of the twenty-one-year-old painting teacher, a superbly gifted boy, and their advance toward a startling fate. As the now-older man looks back at on that summer, he reflects on the meanings he thought he had learned on the threshold of manhood from the perspective of full maturity.

Review Quotes

Paul Skenazy San Francisco Chronicle An introspective and philosophical tale...this novel is a carefully conceived series of events trapped in deeply considered ideas about how art both reproduces and creates our sense of life.

Reginald Ollen The Nation One comes away from this novel with the certainty that, regardless of what cultural baggage -- or garbage -- we carry into the forest, the majesty of nature and the mysterious spirit of our Native American past are things to carry home forever.

Robert Wilson USA Today The Tongues of Angels may be Price's most inviting novel yet.

About the Author

Reynolds Price (1933-2011) was born in Macon, North Carolina. Educated at Duke University and, as a Rhodes Scholar, at Merton College, Oxford University, he taught at Duke beginning in 1958 and was the James B. Duke Professor of English at the time of his death. His first short stories, and many later ones, are published in his Collected Stories. A Long and Happy Life was published in 1962 and won the William Faulkner Award for a best first novel. Kate Vaiden was published in 1986 and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. The Good Priest's Son in 2005 was his fourteenth novel. Among his thirty-seven volumes are further collections of fiction, poetry, plays, essays, and translations. Price is a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and his work has been translated into seventeen languages.