Grove Press
Grove Press
Grove Press
“What The Car Thief is really concerned with emerges between its realistic lines–slowly, delicately, and with quiet but consummate art.” –Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times
Originally published to enormous acclaim, The Car Thief is an extraordinary tale of the heart. At the age of sixteen, Alex Housman has just stolen his fourteenth car. His parents are divorced and he lives with his father, an alcoholic who keeps a pint in the glove compartment and works the night shift. Alex hopes for many things: to be admired by a quiet and lovely girl like Irene Shaeffer; to live like his younger brother, Howard, who is at the lake with his mother and her new husband; and to part of the lives of others. The Car Thief explores the love between Alex and his father, both of whom are eventually driven to acts of desperation in this emotional story, filled with profound insight and unusual triumphs.
“A remarkable, gripping first novel.” –Joyce Carol Oates
“The Car Thief is a poignant and beautifully written novel, so true and so excruciatingly painful that one can’t read it without feeling the knife’s cruel blade in the heart.” –Margaret Manning, The Boston Globe
“A story so modestly precise and so movingly inevitable that before I knew what was happening I felt in the grip of some kind of thriller. . . . The climactic episode is one of the most profoundly powerful in American fiction, secretly and simply, like the book of which it is a part.” –Joseph McElroy, The New York Times Book Review
“What The Car Thief is really concerned with emerges between its realistic lines–slowly, delicately, and with quiet but consummate art.” –Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times
An Independent Literary Publisher Since 1917
