We the Animals by Justin Torres

We the Animals by Justin Torres

ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURY

The critically acclaimed debut from the National Book Award-winning author of Blackouts.

In this award-winning, groundbreaking novel, Justin Torres plunges us into the chaotic heart of one family, the intense bonds of three brothers, and the mythic effects of this fierce love on the people we must become.

"A tremendously gifted writer whose highly personal voice should excite us in much the same way that Raymond Carver's or Jeffrey Eugenides's voice did when we first heard it."--The Washington Post

Three brothers tear their way through childhood-- smashing tomatoes all over each other, building kites from trash, hiding out when their parents do battle, tiptoeing around the house as their mother sleeps off her graveyard shift. Paps and Ma are from Brooklyn--he's Puerto Rican, she's white--and their love is a serious, dangerous thing that makes and unmakes a family many times. Life in this family is fierce and absorbing, full of chaos and heartbreak and the euphoria of belonging completely to one another.

From the intense familial unity felt by a child to the profound alienation he endures as he begins to see the world, this beautiful novel reinvents the coming-of-age story in a way that is sly and punch-in-the-stomach powerful.

"We the Animals is a dark jewel of a book. It's heartbreaking. It's beautiful. It resembles no other book I've read."--Michael Cunningham

"A fiery ode to boyhood . . . A welterweight champ of a book."--NPR, Weekend Edition

We the Animals, a national bestseller by Justin Torres, has been translated into fifteen languages and is now a feature film. He's had short fiction published in The New Yorker, Harper's, Granta, Tin House, The Washington Post, Glimmer Train, Flaunt, and other magazines, as well as nonfiction in The Guardian and The Advocate. He was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, a Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study fellow at Harvard, and a Cullman Center Fellow at The New York Public Library. He graduated from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He was selected one of the National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35 for 2012. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the United States Artists Rolón Fellowship in Writing, and the VCU Cabell First Writer Prize.

He was just appointed Picador Guest Professor of Literature at Leipzig University. He is an Associate Professor of English at UCLA and lives in Los Angeles.