Paco's Story

New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, (1986).

Price: $350.00

Hardcover. First edition. Edges of the boards a bit sunned, thus very good in a lightly worn, near fine dustwrapper. Author's second novel, winner of the National Book Award. Inscribed by Heinemann to the widow of author James Jones: "5/20/88 Gloria – I wish you every good feeling in my heart. A great pleasure to meet you, Truly, Larry Heinemann."

Item #92626
ISBN: 0374228477

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Item #92626 Paco's Story. Larry HEINEMANN.

Larry Heinemann
birth name: Larry Curtiss Heinemann
born: 1/18/1944

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Biography

Washington Post Book World reviewer Duncan Spencer called Heinemann "the grunt's novelist of the Vietnam War," adding: "His is the storytelling of life and death between the laager and the tree line, a life of dirt, fear, dope, alcohol, brutality, curses and evil. He tells, from his own experience as a soldier, the results of fighting a war without will and without authority." Heinemann spent a number of years working on Close Quarters, his first novel. In a review for the New York Times, critic Richard R. Lingeman called it "an unremittingly honest look into the black pit of war." Paco's Story offers a different perspective on the war. The novel's hero, Paco Sullivan, returns to America wounded and disfigured, his company's only survivor. The ghosts of Paco's fallen comrades narrate the story of his wandering into a small Midwestern town and finding work as a dishwasher in a diner. Most critics found the novel deeply affecting and praised its imagery and unusual ghostly voice. - from Contemporary Authors Onlinemore