Robert Stone: Dog Soldiers, A Flag for Sunrise, Outerbridge Reach (LOA #328)

Praise

“A look back at the writer and his work, especially his earliest novels, turns out to be well timed. In books that deserve to endure, Stone anticipates the present in surprising, unsettling ways. . . . Stone’s America is a dark place, but its failures are commensurate with the scale of its aspirations. His protagonists—they can be roughly divided into seekers and ironists, each representing aspects of their creator—are haunted by a vision of life more abundant, a sense of possibility that’s betrayed by their own weakness and the destabilizing undercurrents of history. His prose, with its potent mix of hard-boiled irony, romantic excess, and violent dissolution, can render the mood of a whole period instantly indelible.” —George Packer, The Atlantic

“We can be even more grateful for the new Library of America volume, . . . which puts between two handsome covers three of Stone’s finest novels. . . . Its 1,000 pages contain some of the most handsomely composed, brilliantly perceptive, and painfully honest fiction produced by any postwar American writer. . . . [I]ts contents will engage you, then provoke you, and then break your fucking heart.” —Rob Latham, Los Angeles Review of Books

“A trifecta of thoroughbreds. . . . The Library of America volume showcases Stone at his fearsome peak . . . ordered, propulsive, hyperrealistic yet phantasmagoric with great bursts of rabid thinking.”  
—Joy Williams, Bookforum

“Intricately plotted and often suspenseful, [Stone’s] fiction tends to run a low-grade fever generated by ambition, racism, fear, drugs, and alcohol, conveyed in a tone that has the odd property of being both frightening and disconcertingly funny. In this particular mode, Stone was unsurpassed, and at least two of his novels, A Flag for Sunrise and Outerbridge Reach, . . . have a political scope, eloquence, and cultural knowingness that qualifies them as great novels.”  
—Charles Baxter, Harper’s Magazine

“Robert Stone belonged to the remarkable cohort of American fiction writers born in the 1930s. . . . [This] superbly produced Library of America volume gathering three of [his] novels, . . . makes a case for a full-fledged revival. There can be no doubt that such an effort is timely.” 
—The American Conservative