Benjamin Percy

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Novels

by Benjamin Percy

The Wilding

Red Moon

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Praise

The Wilding is a virtuoso blend of beauty and violence, hope and despair, tough and touching, lust and terror, literary craft and genre plotting. Like James Dickey, Benjamin Percy drags his characters into the wilderness–into a canyon as black as a gaping mouth, where they struggle to stay alive and in control of what makes them human–but for a new generation of readers concerned with the vanishing West.

Danielle Trussoni, authorAngelology and Falling Through the Earth

REFRESH, REFRESH is full of bravery and bravado, and it fairly crackles with life. These stories mark the beginning of what is bound to be a long and brilliant career for Benjamin Percy. Welcome him.

Ann Patchett, New York Times-bestselling and PEN/Faulkner Award-winning Author, Truth and Beauty, Bel Cantoand The Magician's Assistant

Benjamin Percy is interested in grace, transcendence, the sudden moments in lives when a glow of feeling appears, brightens the chasm, goes dark again, or doesn’t. He has a fabulous eye for detail, the names of things, weeds, weapons, machines, and renders superbly the revelatory shadings of character. In REFRESH, REFRESH he is unafraid of story, plot, and writes of plain lives in crisis without blinking, in sinewy, rippling prose, the rhythms of his sentences ever taking us more deeply inside.

Daniel Woodrell, Pen/West Award-winning Author, Tomato Red, Winter's Bone, and The DeathSweet Mister

The Wilding is a compelling action narrative, universal in its dimensions while utterly grounded in specific particulars. Ben Percy is a stunning storyteller. His fearful wildernesses, both physical and psychic, kept me up through the night.

William Kittredge, authorHole in the Sky and The Willow Field

Benjamin Percy’s The Wilding is a tour de force meditation and treatise on the nature of violence, the violence of nature, man in the wild, and the wild in man—cleverly disguised as a page-turning adventure. Not just a “must” read, but a need read, this book is timely, terrifying, terrific.

Antonya Nelson, author, In the LandMen and Female Trouble

Selected as one of the “Best of the Northwest” for fall/winter 2010 by the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association

The Wilding is an urgent and haunting look at the darker side of our nature and at our often futile attempts to control and manage the natural world.

Kansas City Star

There are a hundred ways to feel frightened and lost in a forest, and the excellent, savvy Benjamin Percy can evoke them all. THE WILDING, a brilliant literary novel that feels at times almost like Geoffrey Household’s classic Rogue Male, seems to have been written on his vibrating nerve-endings. This book is filled with dread, sadness, tension and a tireless vision of mankind’s thoughtless devastation of an ancient and more authentic way of life. It is almost impossible to put down. James Dicke…

Peter Straub, bestselling author, Ghost Story, A Dark Matterand Shadowland

I admire the work of Benjamin Percy for its sheer ferocity and compassion, for its deep empathy for people at the hard edges of rage and grief and fear. The stories in Refresh, Refresh are big-hearted and drunk and dangerous, and there’s a heightened, unnerving vibe as you travel through Percy’s world. You never know where you will end up at the close of a Percy story, but you can be sure that he’ll actually take you somewhere.

Dan Chaon, Author, Among the Missing and You Remind MeMe

Chosen by the Powells Bookstore chain for their “Indiespensible” Books Subscription Club

“There’s no other way to say it: Ben Percy has written a stunner, a genre-bending novel of suspense and terror but with Percy’s usual force-of-nature language and his deep insights into character. I cannot recommend this novel highly enough, nor could I put it down.” – Tom Franklin, author of Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, Hell at the Breech and Poachers.

Tom Franklin, author of Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter and Hell at the Breech

With RED MOON one of our most blazingly gifted young writers stakes his claim to national attention. Benjamin Percy has one great advantage over most writers who attempt “literary horror”: he understands the literature of real horror from the inside out, and he speaks it like a native. This is a novel with the power to thrill and transport, also to lead the reader well out of her comfort zone and into emotional territory few people have ever seen.

Peter Straub, bestselling author, Ghost Story, Kokoand The Talisman

Named by Young Adult Library Services Association (YALS) as a Great Graphic Novel

The Young Adult Round Table (YART) of the Texas Library Association (TLA) named Refresh Refresh a A Texas Maverick Graphic Novel.

Named by the American Library Association (ALA) as a A Great Graphic Novel for Teens

..powerfully written first novel……he delineates his characters with a knife-sharp psychological edge.

National Public Radio

Listed as one of the Top Ten Books of 2010 by New West Magazine

Just as Percy demonstrates how men manage danger, he’s equally adept at revealing the odd ways men also create it. Percy’s rendering of their psychological dance is masterful.

Orion

2011 Society of Midlands Authors Award for Fiction

Benjamin Percy is one of the most gifted and versatile writers to appear in American publishing in years. His degree of craft and natural talent are extraordinary; his ear for language is absolutely perfect. His prose has the masculine power of Ernest Hemingway’s, but also the sensibilities and compassion of Eudora Welty. His writing is like a meeting of Shakespeare and rock ‘n’ roll. Benjamin Percy knows how to keep it in E-major, and what a ride it is.

James Lee Burke, bestselling author, Feast Day of Fools, Heaven's Prisonersand Neon Rain

A Library Media Connection ‘Best of the Best’ for 2009

Listed as one of the Top 100 Books of the Year by the Kansas City Star

The Wilding wraps its arms around some big themes: the vanishing wilderness, a dissolving marriage, and the shell-shocked re-adjustment to domestic life after combat. It’s a lot to pack into 250 pages, but Percy manages to do it with remarkable ease.

Barnes and Noble

…his writing is as natural, dark, and deep as the woods he writes about. At 31, Percy is as promising a writer as anyone on a certain New York magazine’s list of promising writers under 40.

The Boston Globe

Percy’s writing in this novel is recklessly passionate, ferocious and fast-paced, but his thinking about these subjects is profound and carefully reasoned.

Hayden's Ferry Review