With the breadth and cumulative force of a novel, Mother of Sorrows presents ten interwoven stories of an American family starting out in the post—World War II suburbs of Washington, D.C., a world of identical brick houses and sunstruck, treeless lawns, a world of initial hopefulness from which shame and loss have seemingly been banished. This is the story of two adolescent brothers whose father has suddenly died, and of their beautiful and complicated mother, a mother whom the younger son worshipfully imagines as “Our Mother of the Sighs and Heartaches . . . Our Mother of the Gorgeous Gypsy Earrings . . . Our Mother of the Late Movies and the Cigarettes . . . Our Mother of Sudden Attentiveness . . . Our Mother of Sudden Anger.” This is the brother who narrates these tales as he looks back thirty years later, the only remaining survivor of a world he seeks both to leave behind and to preserve in words forever, a world of sorrow that has held him spellbound even as he has attempted to create a life of his own. Suffused with the beauty of Richard McCann’s extraordinary language, Mother of Sorrows i ntroduces us to a voice that is urgent, contemplative, elegant, angry, revelatory, and like no other in contemporary fiction. In prose as silky smooth as the clothes from his mother's closetthat the protagonist covertly dons, McCann relates an Eisenhower-era coming-of-agein a D.C. suburb of trimmed lawns and station wagons. Civil defense leaflets picture moms in backyard bomb shelters, leafing through magazines stacked on Danish modern coffee tables. In the midst of the cold war, shootouts on Gunsmoke provide drama in the living room. Already more than a little fixated on Our Mother of the Late Movies and Cigarettes, McCann's narrator, when 11, becomes yet more so when his father, an officer assigned to the Pentagon, suddenly falls ill and dies. Overlapping flash-forwards and --backs show older brother Davis OD'ing at 35 and then as a laughing 6-year-old; the glamorous mother dressing for an evening out, then an old woman needing to check her blood sugar. Throughout, McCann captures the nuances of bonding, down to the elaborate "twin speak" the brothers, differing only 15 months in age, devise and ultimately provides insight into a gay man's development at a bygone midcentury. Whitney Scott Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved “Richard McCann’s Mother of Sorrows is almost unbearably beautiful. It is, purely and simply, the real thing–a book so intricately felt, so magnificently written, that it can stand unembarrassed beside the mystery of life itself. It has immediately joined the small body of books I keep close by, for the times I need reminding of the heights we can attain using only ink and paper.” –Michael Cunningham, author of T he Hours “These stories are written in a precise, spare, and tender poetry. They are full of haunted and love-filled moments of American memory.” –Colm Tóibín, author of The Master “These stories are heartbreaking, and yet they are written with so much tenderness I came away from them filled with their beauty rather than their sadness. Richard McCann writes like a dream.” –Ann Patchett, author of Bel Canto “ Mother of Sorrows is written in language so precise and vibrant, reading it brings to mind the elegiac stories of John Cheever and Richard Yates. McCann’s compassionate, refractive method, however, is all his own.” –Bernard Cooper, author of Maps to Anywhere “There is sorrow, of course, in Mother of Sorrows . Richard McCann delivers sorrow, of the most knowing, serious kind–and joy, lust, awareness unfolding, the lyric and the ugly–all held in the loving embrace of exceptionally strong and tender language. McCann delivers.” –Amy Bloom, author of Come to Me “James Baldwin once described successful artists as those who had reconciled themselves to the task of a ‘delicate, arduous, disciplined self-exposure.’ In Mother of Sorrows, Richard McCann has subjected himself to this process with brave honesty, and the result is a portrait of a family as tender as it is harrowing.” –Adam Haslett, author of You Are Not a Stranger Here Richard McCann’s work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly , Esquire , Tin House , and Ploughshares , and in many anthologies, including Best American Essays 2000 . He is the author of Ghost Letters , a book of poems. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and from the Fulbright and Rockefeller Foundations. He lives in Washington, D.C., where he co-directs the graduate program in creative writing at American University. Crêpe de Chine Each night, after dinner, my father went downstairs to his workbench to build birdhouses, which he fashioned from scraps of wood left over from pine-paneling our basement. He was a connoisseur of birdhouses, my mother said. His favorite was a miniature replica of our ranch house, with a tiny