Jay Baron Nicorvo's Books

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A True Crime Memoir

By: Jay Baron Nicorvo

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Best Copy Available

A True Crime Memoir

By: Jay Baron Nicorvo

In the winter of 1984, Sharon Nicorvo was violently raped while delivering pizza to the barracks at Fort Monmouth Army Base in New Jersey. At that time her seven-year-old son Jay was being subjected to repeated and secret sexual abuse by his babysitter. Best Copy Available delves into these devastating events and their aftermath. Thirty years later, Nicorvo received a photocopy of the criminal investigation report generated from that brutal night, which offers a primer to better understand certain assumptions. About class and race. Sex and violence. Crime and punishment. Low and high culture. Sanity, madness, and masculinity. And the facsimile nature of the truth. As various American men-some real, some imagined, all prone to violence-move in and then out of their hardscrabble lives, mother and son spend decades avoiding and ultimately confronting what happened to them in that formative year. From the Jersey Shore to the Gulf Coast of Florida to the Midwest, Best Copy Available tells a harrowing and sometimes hilarious American story of how the love of a single mother helped end an awful cycle of abuse and abandonment. Most ambitiously, Best Copy Available lends voice to an alternative version of American boyhood, manhood, and fatherhood. One where the sons of deadbeat dads can grow up to be stay-at-home dads, and where our boys and men may realize that the most courageous show of strength is not the determined use of force. It's knowing when and how to ask for help"--

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Page Count

239

Publisher

University of Georgia Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0820367389

ISBN 13

9780820367385

The Standard Grand

By: Jay Baron Nicorvo

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The Standard Grand

By: Jay Baron Nicorvo

**One of the BrooklynRail's Best Books of 2017** "Nicorvo is a bracingly original writer and a joy to read." —Dennis Lehane "A desperate masterpiece of a debut" that tells a huge-hearted American saga—of love, violence, war, conspiracy and the aftermath of them all." —Bonnie Jo Campbell "Nicorvo’s muscular and energetic prose will stun readers with its poignancy, while providing a punch to the solar plexus." —Booklist (Starred Review) "A dash of Coetzee, a dram of Delillo, but mostly just the complicated compassion of Jay Nicorvo. The Standard Grand is a brutally beautiful novel." —Pam Houston, author of Contents May Have Shifted "It seems possible that Nicorvo has ingested all the darkness of this life and now breathes fire.” Nick Flynn, author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City When an Army trucker goes AWOL before her third deployment, she ends up sleeping in Central Park. There, she meets a Vietnam vet and widower who inherited a tumbledown Borscht Belt resort. Converted into a halfway house for homeless veterans, the Standard—and its two thousand acres over the Marcellus Shale Formation—is coveted by a Houston-based multinational company. Toward what end, only a corporate executive knows. With three violent acts at its center—a mauling, a shooting, a mysterious death decades in the past—and set largely in the Catskills, The Standard Grand spans an epic year in the lives of its diverse cast: a female veteran protagonist, a Mesoamerican lesbian landman, a mercenary security contractor keeping secrets and seeking answers, a conspiratorial gang of combat vets fighting to get peaceably by, and a cougar—along with appearances by Sammy Davis, Jr. and Senator Al Franken. All of the characters—soldiers, civilians—struggle to discover that what matters most is not that they’ve caused no harm, but how they make amends for the harm they’ve caused. Jay Baron Nicorvo's The Standard Grand confronts a glaring cultural omission: the absence of women in our war stories. Like the best of its characters—who aspire more to goodness than greatness—this American novel hopes to darn a hole or two in the frayed national fabric.

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Page Count

370

Publisher

Macmillan + ORM

Published Date

ISBN 10

1250108950

ISBN 13

9781250108951

Best Copy Available

A True Crime Memoir

By: Jay Baron Nicorvo

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Best Copy Available

A True Crime Memoir

By: Jay Baron Nicorvo

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Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

239

Publisher

University of Georgia Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0820367389

ISBN 13

9780820367385

The Standard Grand

A Novel

By: Jay Baron Nicorvo

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The Standard Grand

A Novel

By: Jay Baron Nicorvo

When an Army trucker goes AWOL before her third deployment, she ends up sleeping in Central Park. There, she meets a Vietnam vet and widower who inherited a tumbledown Borscht Belt resort. Converted into a halfway house for homeless veterans, the Standard--and its two thousand acres over the Marcellus Shale Formation--is coveted by a Houston-based multinational company--toward what end, only a corporate executive knows. With three violent acts at its center--a mauling, a shooting, a mysterious death decades in the past--and set largely in the Catskills, [this book] spans an epic year in the lives of its diverse cast"--

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