A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE Viking marauders descend on a much-plundered island, hoping some mayhem will shake off the winter blahs. A man is booted out of his home after his wife discovers that the print of a bare foot on the inside of his car's windshield doesn't match her own. Teenage cousins, drugged by summer, meet with a reckoning in the woods. A boy runs off to the carnival after his stepfather bites him in a brawl. Wells Tower's version of America is touched with the seamy splendor of the dropout, the misfit: failed inventors, boozy dreamers, hapless fathers, wayward sons. With electric prose and savage wit, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned is a profound new collection of stories. “This arresting debut collection of stories decisively establishes Mr. Tower as a writer of uncommon talent.” ― Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times “Artful and funny and empathetic. His fictional universe is a perfectly balanced little biosphere of violence and mercy, aggression and nurturing.” ― Sam Anderson, New York magazine “A striking, often savage first collection of stories. Tower's language is as compact and muscular as a wrestler's body.” ― Heller McAlpin, San Francisco Chronicle “Tower writes about raggedy men, neglected boys, and quarrelsome Vikings who are down on their luck (if they ever had any). But the stories are very funny, and surprising, and possess a rugged beauty.” ― Vendela Vida, Vanity Fair “Tower seems incapable of writing a boring description. A crackling, head-turning debut.” ― Jonathan Miles, Men's Journal “It sometimes feels as if there's nothing Tower can't render in arresting fashion. His prose is a welcome reminder that the first job of the fiction writer is to introduce the reader to worlds both new and familiar in ways they wouldn't have arrived at on their own.” ― Jim Ruland, Los Angeles Times “Wells Tower's stories are written, thrillingly, in authentic American vernacular--violent, funny, bleak, and beautiful. You need to read them, now.” ― Michael Chabon, author of The Yiddish Policemen's Union and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay Wells Tower is the author of the short story collection Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned.  His short stories and journalism have appeared in The New Yorker ,  Harper’s Magazine , McSweeney’s , The Paris Review , The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories , The Washington Post Magazine , and elsewhere. He received two Pushcart Prizes and the Plimpton Prize from The Paris Review . He divides his time between Chapel Hill, North Carolina and Brooklyn, New York. Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned Stories By Wells Tower Picador Copyright © 2010 Wells Tower All right reserved. ISBN: 9780312429294 Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned  Just as we were all getting back into the mainland domestic groove, somebody started in with dragons and crop blights from across the North Sea. We all knew who it was. A turncoat Norwegian monk named Naddod had been big medicine on the dragon-and-blight circuit for the last decade or so, and was known to bring heavy ordnance for whoever could lay out some silver. Scuttlebutt had it that Naddod was operating out of a monastery on Lindisfarne, whose people we’d troubled on a pillage-and-consternation tour through Northumbria after Corn Harvesting Month last fall. Now bitter winds were screaming in from the west, searing the land and ripping the grass from the soil. Salmon were turning up spattered with sores, and grasshoppers clung to the wheat in rapacious buzzing bunches. I tried to put these things out of my mind. We’d been away three long months harrying the Hibernian shores, and now I was back with Pila, my common-law, and thinking that home was very close to paradise in these endless summer days. We’d built our house together, Pila and me. It was a fine little wattleand- daub cabin on a pretty bit of plain where a wide blue fjord stabbed into the land. On summer evenings my young wife and I would sit out front, high on potato wine, and watch the sun stitch its orange skirt across the horizon. At times such as these, you get a good, humble feeling, like the gods made this place, this moment, first and concocted you as an afterthought just to be there to enjoy it. I was doing a lot of enjoying and relishing and laying around the rack with Pila, though I knew what it meant when I heard those flint-edged winds howling past the house. Some individuals three weeks’ boat ride off were messing up our summer and would probably need their asses whipped over it. Of course, DjarfFairhair had his stinger out even before his wife spotted those dragons winging it inland from the coast. He was boss on our ship and a fool for warfare. His appetite for action was so terrifying and infectious, he’d once riled up a gang of Frankish slaves and led them south to afflict and maim their own countrymen. He’d gotten in four days of decent sacking when the slaves began