Vernon God Little

In this black comedy by an Australian, set in Texas, Vernon, a poor-white 15-year-old, is accused of perpetrating the high-school massacre that was actually the work of his friend, Jesus, who dies in the process. Panicked, Vernon takes off, becomes a media star, is captured, tried for the crime, and sentenced to death. But his small Texas town benefits from the media circus, becoming for the first time in years economically self-sufficient. A New York Times Notable Book for 2003.

"...VERNON GOD LITTLE is raucous and brooding, coarse and lyric, corrosive and sentimental in about equal measure....Pierre has a flawless ear for adolescent-boy speech....Vernon is a Holden Caulfield on amphetamines...." - Lawrence A. Young (New Yorker, 10/27/03)

"[A] dangerous, smart, ridiculous and very funny first novel....The writing is simply terrific....[T]here is a jagged, punk-rock sensibility to Pierre's prose, absolutely his own. Plot aside--and there is much in this novel to keep the reader turning pages--VERNON GOD LITTLE is just plain fun to read." - Mark Swinton (New York Times Book Review, 11/9/03)

"[O]bscenely entertaining....The suffering that underlies this novel is no sham emotion." - Jack McCoy (Bookforum, Fall 2003)

"Pierre is good at delineating the petty rivalries and preoccupations of Vernon's mother and her friends....But the real triumph lies in Pierre's creation of Vernon, a mouthpiece for today's disaffected teenagers....[I]n his credible articulation of Vernon's existential angst Pierre has created an invigorating heir to Holden Caulfield." - Aikaterine Koumarianou (Literary Review, 10/1/03)

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