Books by Nick Flynn
Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir
by Nick Flynn
"Clear-eyed, inventive, and astonishingly honest." ―Elissa Schappel, Vanity Fair
Nick Flynn met his father when he was working as a caseworker in a homeless shelter in Boston. As a teenager he'd received letters from this stranger father, a self-proclaimed poet and con man doing time in federal prison for bank robbery. Another Bullshit Night in Suck City tells the story of the trajectory that led Nick and his father onto the streets, into that shelter, and finally to each other.
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Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir
by Nick Flynn
"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.
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Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir
by Nick Flynn
"Clear-eyed, inventive, and astonishingly honest." ―Elissa Schappel, Vanity Fair
Nick Flynn met his father when he was working as a caseworker in a homeless shelter in Boston. As a teenager he'd received letters from this stranger father, a self-proclaimed poet and con man doing time in federal prison for bank robbery. Another Bullshit Night in Suck City tells the story of the trajectory that led Nick and his father onto the streets, into that shelter, and finally to each other.
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$18.99
Being Flynn
by Nick Flynn
This "stunningly beautiful memoir" (San Francisco Chronicle) is now a major motion picture starring Robert De Niro and Paul Dano.
Nick Flynn met his father when he was working as a caseworker in a homeless shelter in Boston. As a teenager he'd received letters from this stranger father, a self-proclaimed poet and con man doing time in federal prison for bank robbery. Being Flynn (previously published as Another Bullshit Night in Suck City) tells the story of the trajectory that led Nick and his father onto the streets, into that shelter, and finally to each other.
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The Reenactments: A Memoir
by Nick Flynn
A literary tour de force about the making of a film and representation from a master of the memoir form. For Nick Flynn, that game we all play―the who-would-play-you-in-the-movie-of-your-life game―has been resolved. The Reenactments chronicles the surreal experience of being on set during the making of the film Being Flynn, from his best-selling memoir Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, and watching the central events of his life reenacted: his father's long run of homelessness and his mother's suicide. Flynn tells the story of Robert De Niro's first meeting with his real father in Boston and of watching Julianne Moore attempt to throw herself into the sea. The result is a mesmerizingly sharp-edged and kaleidoscopic literary tour de force as well as a compelling argument about consciousness, representation, and grief.
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The Ticking Is the Bomb: A Memoir
by Nick Flynn
"A beautiful, intelligent book that renders pain both ordinary and extraordinary into art."―Susanna Sonnenberg, San Francisco Chronicle In 2007, during the months before Nick Flynn’s daughter’s birth, his growing outrage and obsession with torture, exacerbated by the Abu Ghraib photographs, led him to Istanbul to meet some of the Iraqi men depicted in those photos. Haunted by a history of addiction, a relationship with his unsteady father, and a longing to connect with his mother who committed suicide, Flynn artfully interweaves in this memoir passages from his childhood, his relationships with women, and his growing obsession―a questioning of terror, torture, and the political crimes we can neither see nor understand in post-9/11 American life. The time bomb of the title becomes an unlikely metaphor and vehicle for exploring the fears and joys of becoming a father. Here is a memoir of profound self-discovery―of being lost and found, of painful family memories and losses, of the need to run from love, and of the ability to embrace it again.
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This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire: A Memoir
by Nick Flynn
A searing memoir on how childhood spills into parenthood from the critically acclaimed author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City.
When Nick Flynn was seven years old, his mother set fire to their house. The event loomed large in his imagination for years, but it’s only after having a child of his own that he understands why. He returns with his young daughter to the landscape of his youth, reflecting on how his feral childhood has him still in its reins, and forms his memories into lyrical bedtime stories populated by the both sinister and wounded Mister Mann.
With the spare lyricism and dark irony of his classic, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, Flynn excavates the terrain of his traumatic upbringing and his mother’s suicide. This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire unravels the story of the fire that Flynn had to escape, and the ways in which, as an adult, he has carried that fire with him until it threatens to burn down his own house. Here Nick confronts his failings with fierce candor, even as they threaten to tear his family apart. His marriage in crisis, Flynn seeks answers from his therapist, who tells him he has “the ethics of a drowning man.”
This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire takes us on the journey of a man struggling to hold himself together in prose that is raw and moving, sharp-edged and wry. Alternating literary analysis and philosophy with intimate memoir, Flynn probes his deepest ethical dilemmas.
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No copies available.
This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire: A Memoir
by Nick Flynn
A searing memoir from critically acclaimed author Nick Flynn, on how childhood spills into parenthood.
When Nick Flynn was seven years old, his mother set fire to their house. The event loomed large in his imagination for years, but it’s only after having a child of his own that he understands why. He returns with his young daughter to the landscape of his youth, reflecting on how his feral childhood has him still in its reins, and forms his memories into lyrical bedtime stories populated by the both sinister and wounded Mister Mann.
With the spare lyricism and dark irony of his classic, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, Flynn excavates the terrain of his traumatic upbringing and his mother’s suicide. This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire unravels the story of the fire that Flynn had to escape, and the ways in which, as an adult, he has carried that fire with him until it threatens to burn down his own house. Here Nick confronts his failings with fierce candor, even as they threaten to tear his family apart. His marriage in crisis, Flynn seeks answers from his therapist, who tells him he has “the ethics of a drowning man.”
This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire takes us on the journey of a man struggling to hold himself together in prose that is raw and moving, sharp-edged and wry. Alternating literary analysis and philosophy with intimate memoir, Flynn probes his deepest ethical dilemmas.
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Alice Invents a Little Game and Alice Always Wins: A Play
by Nick Flynn
In this first play from the award-winning memoirist and poet Nick Flynn, four strangers meet during a blackout on a New York City sidewalk. Gideon finds himself locked out of his apartment, stranded on the street with nothing but a television and the company of three individuals, each mysterious in their own way: the specter-like Alice, ringleader of the neighborhood; Esra, a fifteen-year-old girl whose mother is MIA―again; and Ivan, a stranded businessman trying to make his way home. As Gideon makes futile attempts to break into an apartment that may or may not be his, an unsettling connection between Ivan and Esra develops while Alice and Gideon look on helplessly. Unable to make sense of their predicament, let alone alter it, the four float aimlessly in and out of seeming reality only to find themselves more lost when the electricity finally comes back on.
Once again exploring the tenuous membrane that separates comfortable, everyday existence from the desperate margins of society, Flynn portrays an urban dystopia disturbingly similar to our own world while poignantly tapping into the loneliness and peril of city life.
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Tin House: Evil
by Francine Prose, Nick Flynn, Josip Novakovich, Chris Adrian, Moonshine
In this issue of Tin House some of today's most prominent writers examine evil in its various manifestations, from war to torture to Satanism. Featured here, among others, are works by Francine Prose, author of A Changed Man, Nick Flynn, author of the award-winning collection of poems Some Ether, and Chris Adrian, whose short fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, McSweeney's, The New Yorker, and The Best American Short Stories.
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Some Ether: Poems
by Nick Flynn
Winner of a "Discovery"/The Nation Award
Winner of the 1999 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry
Some Ether is one of the more remarkable debut collections of poetry to appear in America in recent memory. As Mark Doty has noted, "these poems are more than testimony; in lyrics of ringing clarity and strange precision, Flynn conjures a will to survive, the buoyant motion toward love which is sometimes all that saves us. Some Ether resonates in the imagination long after the final poem; this is a startling, moving debut."
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Blind Huber: Poems
by Nick Flynn
Award-winning poet Nick Flynn takes readers into the dangerous and irresistible center of the hive
I sit in a body & think of a body, I picture
Burnens' hands, my words
make them move. I say, plunge them into the hive,
& his hands go in.-from "Blind Huber"
Blindness does not deter François Huber-the eighteenth-century beekeeper-in his quest to learn about bees through their behavior. Through an odd, but productive arrangement, Huber's assistant Burnens becomes his eyes, his narrator as he goes about his work. In Nick Flynn's extraordinary new collection, Huber and Burnens speak and so do the bees. The strongest virgin waits silently to kill the other virgins; drones are "made of waiting"; the swarm attempts to protect the queen. It is a cruel existence. Everyone sacrifices for the sweet honey, except the human hand that harvests it all in a single afternoon.
Blind Huber is about the body, love, and devotion and also about the limits of what can be known and what will forever be unknown. Nick Flynn's bees and keepers-sometimes in a state of magnificent pollen-drunk dizziness-view the world from a striking and daring perspective.
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My Feelings: Poems
by Nick Flynn
A daring and intimate new book by the poet and memoirist Nick Flynn, "a champion of contemporary American poetry" (Newpages)
. . . the take from his bank jobs, all of it
will come to me, if I can just get him to draw me
a map, if I can find the tree, if I can find
the shovel. And the house, the mansion he
grew up in, soon a lawyer will pass
a key across a walnut desk, but even this
lawyer will not be able to tell me where this
mansion is.
―from "Kafka"
In My Feelings, Nick Flynn makes no claims on anyone else's. These poems inhabit a continually shifting sense of selfhood, in the attempt to contain quicksilver realms of emotional energy―from grief and panic to gratitude and understanding.
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The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands: Poems
by Nick Flynn
Now in paperback, the latest poetry by Nick Flynn, author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City and The Ticking Is the Bomb
The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands begins as a meditation on love and the body but soon breaks down into a collage of voices culled from media reports, childhood memories, testimonies from Abu Ghraib detainees, passages from documentary films, overheard conversations, and scraps of poems and song, only to reassemble with a gathering sonic force. It's as if all the noise that fills our days were a storm, yet at the center is a quiet place, but to get there you must first pass through the storm, with eyes wide open, singing. Each poem becomes a hallucinatory, shifting experience, through jump cut, lyric persuasion, and deadpan utterance. This is an emotional, resilient response to some of the essential issues of our day by Nick Flynn, one of America's riskiest and most innovative writers.
"An unflinching attempt to use poetry to grapple with some of the most shameful monsters of this new century―the torture of detainees at Abu Ghraib and the terrible cost war enacts on everyone caught up in it, both civilians and soldiers." ―The Rumpus
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The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands: Poems
by Nick Flynn
New poetry by the acclaimed writer Nick Flynn, author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City and The Ticking Is the Bomb
electrocution, no―the boy stood in the hot-hot room
stammering I did stammering I did stammering I
did stammering I did stammering everything you say I did
I did.
―from "Fire"
The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands is Nick Flynn's first new poetry collection in nearly a decade. What begins as a meditation on love and the body soon breaks down into a collage of voices culled from media reports, childhood memories, testimonies from Abu Ghraib detainees, passages from documentary films, overheard conversations, and scraps of poems and song, only to reassemble with a gathering sonic force. It's as if all the noise that fills our days were a storm, yet at the center is a quiet place, but to get there you must first pass through the storm, with eyes wide open, singing. Each poem becomes a hallucinatory, shifting experience, through jump cut, lyric persuasion, and deadpan utterance. This is an emotional, resilient response to some of the essential issues of our day by one of America's riskiest and most innovative writers.
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Note Slipped Under the Door, A: Teaching from Poems We Love
by Nick Flynn, Shirley McPhillips
WHATEVER SHIRLEY OR NICK TELL YOU-BELIEVE THEM.
- Naomi Shihab Nye
How do we read a poem? What can we teach from a poem we love? How can we name what poets do in order to inform our writing, our teaching?
In their staff development work with teachers, Nick Flynn and Shirley McPhillips have often encountered these and similar questions. This book invites preservice and inservice teachers, staff developers - anyone who wants to make a lasting place for poetry in their own and their students' lives - into many of these same primary through middle school classrooms for an up-close look at several thoughtful, rigorous, poetry inquiries.
Each chapter begins with a mentor poem as the centerpiece for discussion, followed by a short narrative of ways the authors view their world through that chapter's particular poetic lens. The authors then walk the reader into a classroom writer's workshop where, through vignettes, conversations, and carefully designed mini-lessons, that chapter's key element of poetic practice is being studied over time.
Other aspects that will help teachers in designing and conducting inquiry around mentor poems include:mini-lessons that take students through an inquiry from launch to in-depth extensions;illustrations of student writing samples in the try it stages, successive drafts, and crafted poems;words, stories, and examples of best-loved poets that inspire and instruct us in our own thinking and teaching;appendixes that include various types of book lists, charts, conference transcripts, and additional poems.
A Note Slipped Under the Door will show how you might help your student writers let the poems they love teach them what they need to know, and build a writing life that includes finding and crafting their own.
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I Will Destroy You: Poems
by Nick Flynn
The newest collection from Nick Flynn, whose “songs of experience hum with immediacy” (The New York Times)
Beginning with a poem called “Confessional” and ending with a poem titled “Saint Augustine,” Nick Flynn's I Will Destroy You interrogates the potential of art to be redemptive, to remake and reform. But first the maker of art must claim responsibility for his past, his actions, his propensity to destroy others and himself. “Begin by descending,” Augustine says, and the poems delve into the deepest, most defeating parts of the self: addiction, temptation, infidelity, and repressed memory. These are poems of profound self-scrutiny and lyric intensity, jagged and probing. I Will Destroy You is an honest accounting of all that love must transcend and what we must risk for its truth.
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Low: Poems
by Nick Flynn
Low explores the jaggedness of memory and what is salvageable when the past is broken by loss, violence, and trauma. Punctuating Nick Flynn’s signature lyric poems are prose pieces and sequences, veering toward essays, including “Notes on a Calendar Found in a Stranger’s Apartment,” a truly strange experience of cataloging a deceased neighbor’s belongings and how quickly they become worthless; “Notes on Thorns & Blood,” a study of time and wounds; and “Notes on a Year of Corona,” a loose sonnet crown about the early stages of the pandemic and the unrest after racist police violence.
Despite its existential reverberations, Low is a celebration of desire in all its forms―the desire for home, the desire to be held, the desire for people to be kind to one another, the desire to understand where we are from and what we can do to make the best of that. But how do we create a home, these poems ask, in a world of satellites and atom bombs and algorithms, those things designed to dehumanize and reduce us? To get low is to reconnect with the earth, to engage with the emotional state of the planet, to remember that “the cure all along grows beside us.” Flynn’s collection is a prismatic, even prophetic, experience, with new complexity and ardor at every turn.
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$17.00
Open City #23: Prose by Poets
by Jim Harrison, Nick Flynn, Jill Bialosky, Wayne Koestenbaum, Glyn Maxwell, Deborah Garrison, Open City Magazine, Rebecca Wolff
Open City continues to present new writing with a daring edge and a youthful glow, appealing to readers who want to know what’s next in contemporary literature. This special issue features fiction, essays, and artworkall by poets. Each piece of prose will be accompanied by a selection of the writer’s poems. Contributors include: Deborah Garrison, Nick Tosches, Honor Moore, Rodney Jack, David Lehman, Jim Harrison, Thurston Moore, David Berman, and Catherine Bowman, Alfred Star Hamilton, and Jerome Badanes.
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