Selected Book

Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir

Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir

  • Paperback
  • Author: Nick Flynn
  • Publisher: W. W. Norton
  • Release Date: September 2005
  • ISBN-10: 0393329402
  • ISBN-13: 9780393329407
  • List Price: $13.95

Price Comparisons

E-mail these Cheap Book Prices to a friend!

Store Price Condition Free Shipping? Online Coupons and Deals

Half.com
(Marketplace)

Shop & Save

$4.00

as of 1/7 7pm EST

Used

NO, $3.49 to $3.99

There are no current coupons/deals for this store in our database.
If you find one, please contact us.

Amazon
(Marketplace)

Shop & Save

$6.95

as of 1/7 7pm EST

Used

NO, $3.99

There are no current coupons/deals for this store in our database.
If you find one, please contact us.

Amazon
(Marketplace)

Shop & Save

$7.96

as of 1/7 7pm EST

New

NO, $3.99

There are no current coupons/deals for this store in our database.
If you find one, please contact us.

Half.com
(Marketplace)

Shop & Save

$8.21

as of 1/7 7pm EST

New

NO, $3.49 to $3.99

There are no current coupons/deals for this store in our database.
If you find one, please contact us.

TextbookX

Shop & Save

$10.38

as of 1/7 7pm EST

New

YES, spend $49+

Get FREE Shipping with a $49+ order.

Restrictions: See site for details.

Click "Shop & Save" to show coupon code HERE!

Amazon

Shop & Save

$11.16

as of 1/7 7pm EST

New

YES, spend $25+

Get FREE Shipping with a $25+ puchase.

Restrictions: Spend over $25, see Amazon for details.

Click "Shop & Save" to show coupon code HERE!

Click to view coupon instructions

Shop & Save

button not working?   Click Here

Summaries and Customer Reviews provided by Amazon

Summary

"A stunningly beautiful new memoir…a near-perfect work of literature."—Stephen Elliot, San Francisco Chronicle

"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. With a new postscript for the paperback edition.

Customer Reviews

Average Rating: Score = 4.5 Score = 4.5 Score = 4.5 Score = 4.5 Score = 4.5

A book for those who don't have a homeless, inebriated, mentally ill family member

Rating: Score = 5 Score = 5 Score = 5 Score = 5 Score = 5

This is a book for those who don't have a homeless, inebriated and/or mentally ill family member. Now you know what it's like and who "those people" are. They're somebody's father/son/mother/daughter/cousin/etc. There's only so much you can do for someone in that situation, which is sad, but eventually you give up.

By the way, this is one of the best, most moving books I have ever read. I highly recommend it. Especially if you have a family member who is chronically homeless due to mental illness or substance abuse. Or, especially if you don't, so you can understand those who do.

A tough read but worth the effort. Nice payoff at the end!

Rating: Score = 4 Score = 4 Score = 4 Score = 4 Score = 4

Nick Flynn's biographical tale of his complicated relationship with his alcoholic father is fascinating, though at times the descriptions of how hopeless life was during the years described can be a bit off putting. But Flynn succeeds in redeeming himself and the reader with a wonderful last 100 or so pages, which are filled with hope and beauty.

I read this book at basically the same time I was reading Jonathan Ames fine graphic novel "The Alcoholic" and both struck me at sort of attempts at a "first step." That is, a description of their drinking and drugging and the awful and hopeless places it took them. Though Ames work ends ambiguously, with the main character lost between having another drink and denying himself, Flynn seems to have found a life worth living, and for that I commend him and heartily recommend this book for those interested in addiction and family dysfunction.

Senior Writers Seminar - Dominski

Rating: Score = 5 Score = 5 Score = 5 Score = 5 Score = 5

This memoir recounts the story of a young man who, fatherless as a boy, gets to know his father for the first time through his job at a homeless shelter. The story alternates between chapters about the author's childhood, or even before he was born, and chapters about him as a grown man, encountering his homeless father. The author's very detailed descriptions of his job at the shelter provide a very stark look into homelessness in a city, "Lice thrive so well on his body that they can be seen crawling over him from twenty paces." (Page 47) These descriptions of the homeless the author encounters resonate with the reader because the author is living with the knowledge that his father may be living an equally desperate lifestyle.
As the chapters switch between time frames of the author's life, they also switch between different writing styles; from stream-of-consciousness writing to contained narratives, which also switch between first and third person. The contained narratives, which are written in first person unless they precede the author's birth, are short enough to only cover one event at a time. In another book, such a disjointed development of events may be not work quite as well, but in this memoir, the short chapters allow the author to select which actions of his father's he want to emphasize to the readers. This characteristic of the book causes the father to be cast as the author remembers him, and although this description of him may stray from the actual truth a little because of this, thus is the consequence of a memoir. Interspersed amongst the action-driven chapters are sections of stream-of-consciousness writing that provide a direct look into the author's emotions. Because of this, these chapters contain some of the most powerful writing in the book, "For if you are not responsible for your own father, who is? Who is going to pick him up off the ground if not you?" (Page 27) These sections, though spare in comparison to the narrative chapters, are powerful because they give the author an opportunity to explore his feelings about his father. In these streams of the author's consciousness, he struggles with how responsible he should be for his father, and how much he should let him into his life. Standing next to the narrative sections, these parts allow the author to reflect on and essentially respond to his own actions. It is this relationship in the book, between what has happened and how the author feels about it in retrospect, that makes this memoir so successful at recounting the author's inner struggles.

Having lived on the streets of Las Vegas...

Rating: Score = 4 Score = 4 Score = 4 Score = 4 Score = 4

I can tell you that this author has embellished little. I avoid four letter words in my books simply because I think they distract. Nevertheless, I understand Flynn's reasoning here, and at least for me, the language in this book was palatable. What I found most interesting about this work was how different street living is in Boston compared to Las Vegas and East Los Angeles. Then East LA is a 24/7 war zone. While Boston and Las Vegas are similar in the fact that it's the police in these two cities you had better be wary and respectfully of; in East LA, as bad as the police are, badges are a welcome sight compared to MS-13.

The blurb doesn't live up to the contents

Rating: Score = 1 Score = 1 Score = 1 Score = 1 Score = 1

The assertion a life worth writing about by an individual who can write well proves to be simply that, an assertion. Flynn's talents (?) are mediocre, the book tiresome, repetitive and unfortunately like most of the other 'my childhood was the pits' by which I mean it may self serve the author.

None of the characters were likeable despite being deeply flawed (which often makes the person likeable).

I doubt Flynn's daddy was worth writing about.

It's done now.

Do yourself a favour. Spend your money on a more worthy book - that's just about any other book so the choice is massive.

As for Flynn being a poet, that is still open for debate. If his prose is at all similar to his poetics, his poetry would suck.