The Hue and Cry at Our House
  • Published: 1 July 2018
  • ISBN: 9780143131649
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 208
  • RRP: $32.99

The Hue and Cry at Our House

A Year Remembered

Formats & editions
EBook
23 May 2017
Paperback
1 Jul 2018
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A subtle and lyrical memoir of childhood in Fort Worth, Texas in 1963, exploring how the events, friendships, and losses of his childhood while painting a portrait of America in the 1960s.

The award-winning memoir of one tumultuous year of boyhood in Fort Worth, Texas, opening with a handshake with JFK, and recalling the changes and revelations of the months that followed.

Winner of the LA Times Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose, and a New York Times Editor's Choice.
 
“A marvel of a book—elegant, touching, singular.” —Mary Karr

“Brief and moving . . . An elegantly written book, erudite, perceptive and at times painfully candid.”—Moira Hodgson, Wall Street Journal

After John F. Kennedy’s speech in front of the Hotel Texas in Fort Worth on November 22, 1963, he was greeted by, among others, an 11-year-old Benjamin Taylor and his mother waiting to shake his hand. Only a few hours later, Taylor’s teacher called the class in from recess and, through tears, told them of the president’s assassination. From there Taylor traces a path through the next twelve months, recalling the tumult as he saw everything he had once considered stable begin to grow more complex. Looking back on the love and tension within his family, the childhood friendships that lasted and those that didn’t, his memories of summer camp and family trips, he reflects upon the outsized impact our larger American story had on his own.
 
Benjamin Taylor is one of the most talented writers working today. In lyrical, translucent prose, he thoughtfully extends the story of twelve months into the years before and after, painting a portrait of the artist not simply as a young man, but across his whole life. As he writes, “[A]ny twelve months could stand for the whole. Our years are so implicated in one another that the least important is important enough . . . Any year I chose would show the same mettle, the same frailties stamping me at eleven and twelve.”
  • Published: 1 July 2018
  • ISBN: 9780143131649
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 208
  • RRP: $32.99
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Praise for The Hue and Cry at Our House

"What was it like to be a gifted, gay, upper-middle-class Jewish kid (with a touch of Asperger Syndrome) in 1964 Fort Worth, Texas? The answer is brilliantly explicated in Ben Taylor's memoir, THE HUE AND CRY AT OUR HOUSE, which begins with the assassination of JFK (Taylor shook the president's hand a few hours before Dealey Plaza) and gains momentum from there. That the author will grow up to be one of our most elegant, multifaceted writers is the final turn of the screw."

--Blake Bailey, author of CHEEVER: A LIFE and THE SPLENDID THINGS WE PLANNED

"[A] his witty, painful, uninhibited, compactly Proustian memoir of, ostensibly, one year of childhood. Within his chosen focus, Taylor achieves a necessary feat of autobiography: The child who grew and the adult who more than remembers live together as one on the page. You encounter vitalistic youth; and sense there, also, the wing of mortality. Taylor's Hue and Cry is a vast offer of thanks and glowing triumph, his masterpiece to date."

-- Richard Howard, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and former poetry editor of The Paris Review

"What was it like to be a gifted, gay, upper-middle-class Jewish kid (with a touch of Asperger Syndrome) in 1964 Fort Worth, Texas? The answer is brilliantly explicated in Ben Taylor's memoir, THE HUE AND CRY AT OUR HOUSE, which begins with the assassination of JFK (Taylor shook the president's hand a few hours before Dealey Plaza) and gains momentum from there. That the author will grow up to be one of our most elegant, multifaceted writers is the final turn of the screw."

--Blake Bailey, author of CHEEVER: A LIFE and THE SPLENDID THINGS WE PLANNED

"[A] his witty, painful, uninhibited, compactly Proustian memoir of, ostensibly, one year of childhood. Within his chosen focus, Taylor achieves a necessary feat of autobiography: The child who grew and the adult who more than remembers live together as one on the page. You encounter vitalistic youth; and sense there, also, the wing of mortality. Taylor's Hue and Cry is a vast offer of thanks and glowing triumph, his masterpiece to date."

-- Richard Howard, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and former poetry editor of The Paris Review

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