Nick Flynn

Another Bullshit Night in Suck City

"Devastating....Ranks with Frank Conroy's Stop-Time."—Michael Cunningham

"Sometimes I'd see my father, walking past my building on his way to another nowhere. I could have given him a key, offered a piece of my floor. But if I let him inside the line between us would blur, my own slow-motion car wreck would speed up."

Nick Flynn met his father for the third time when he was twenty-seven years old, working as a caseworker in a homeless shelter in Boston. As a teenager he'd received letters from this stranger, a self-proclaimed poet and con man doing time in federal prison for bank robbery. Nick, his own life precariously unsettled, was living alternately in a ramshackle boat and in a warehouse that was once a strip joint. In bold, dazzling prose, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (a phrase Flynn senior uses to describe his life on the streets) tells the story of two lives and the trajectory that led Nick and his father into that homeless shelter, onto those streets, and finally to each other.

"Nick Flynn's devastating memoir does what only significant works of art can do—it shows us a world we know, but fail to see or understand. No one who reads Another Bullshit Night in Suck City will ever walk through a city in the same way again. If I say that Flynn's book ranks with Frank Conroy's Stop-Time, I mean it as the highest possible praise." —Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours

"What a piece of work. I don't usually like memoirs, but if they were all like Nick Flynn's Another Bullshit Night in Suck City—eloquent, funny, unsentimental, and bravely inventive—I'd read them by the truckload." —Dennis Lehane, author of Mystic River

"Nick Flynn has given us one of the most terrifying families in American letters, though he approaches each character in this ferocious, inventive memoir with an almost radical sense of compassion, as if all that any of us could do were to stumble ahead with the burdens we're given. The result is a book so singular, harrowing and loving as to be indelible." —Mark Doty, author of Firebird

"My favorite book of the past few years, and the best memoir since Stop-Time, This Boy's Life, and The Liar's Club." —Chris Offutt, author of The Strange River Twice and Kentucky Straight

"Another Bullshit Night in Suck City is a wonder, both sweet and agonizing, a fusion of the lyric and the well-wrought story. Nick Flynn finds, through the assemblage, piece by piece, of his own break neck life and father, what all of us must see; our fathers (living, dead, mercurial, solid, never glimpsed) are amazing and wretched; they are genius; they are filthy and naked; they are gut drunk beautiful. This book, in both story and language, shatters convention with every word, and Flynn makes that destruction flawless." —Brad Land, author of Goat

"Another Bullshit Nigh is one of the best books I've read in years—a heartbreaking searing story—the perfect memoir. Nick Flynn hurls himself towards the blunt trauma of history, towards his fear of what he himself might become. It is a story of self-discovery in the best sense, and also a story of the dissembling of history, the fight to keep oneself whole, and the inherent obligations of biology. In the end it is about family, about fathers and sons and how painful it is to know the depth of that relation at its fullest." —A. M. Homes, author of Music for Torching

"Flynn gets the details of the family down cold—egomaniacs with inferiority complexes, forever burning the bridges in front of themselves, cursed with a thirst for which enough is never enough. Gorgeously wrought." —Thomas Lynch, author of The Undertaking