Joseph Allen Boone – The Official Joseph Allen Boone Site

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CONDITIONS OF PRECARITY

SHORT STORIES BY JOSEPH ALLEN BOONE

An immigrant grandmother who sells roses to gay customers at a West Hollywood bar, a deaf-mute masseur and sex worker plying his trade, a transient nesting in the lilac bushes of a New England college campus...

These are a few of the characters in these ten stories who find their existences at grave risk in a world in which every choice impacts an uncertain future.

"At the terrifying center of precarity... Is Joseph Allen Boone's gorgeous prose."
-Michele Latiolais

"Exquisitely wrought stories. Boone's range of character, setting, and development is remarkable" -T.C. Boyle

"A collection that reminds us of our small moments of grace... and illuminates our humanity in these precarious times" - Dana Johnson

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The Debut Novel By Joseph Allen Boone

FURNACE CREEK

Furnace Creek teases us with the question of what Charles Dickens’ Pip might have been like had he grown up in the American South of the 1960s and 1970s and faced the explosive issues that galvanized the world in those decades: racial injustice, a devastating war, women’s and gay rights, class struggle.

"Furnace Creek has everything brilliant novels have . . . It is also wickedly funny, that rare novel full of charming humor and sharp cultural commentary at every turn." -Dana Johnson

"A playful reimagining of Dickens, a tautly plotted thriller, a beautifully observed coming of age story: Furnace Creek. . . seizes you from the beginning and refuses to let you go." - Robert Douglas-Fairhurst

"A funny, moving, and true rendition of everybody’s story: surviving our childhoods, which can be uniquely challenging if you’re Southern, and queer. Boone is a natural novelist, and Furnace Creek is a genuine accomplishment." - Michael Cunningham

“A genuine accomplishment”
MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM
“Ingenious re-telling . . . endearing and knowing”
COLM TOÍBÍN
“Exquisite prose . . . rare emotional urgency”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
“Joyously ambitious! A page-turning novel”
MARIANNE WIGGINS
“Refuses to let you go”
ROBERT DOUGLAS-FAIRHURST

“I was . . . seduced”
VIET NGUYEN
“Lyrical and inventive”
KIRKUS REVIEWS
“Brilliant . . . wickedly funny”
DANA JOHNSON
“Hilarious and heartrending”
LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS
“A wonderful novel with psychological depth”
BOOKSCOVERTOCOVER

The Inspiration for Furnace Creek

I was born in a small town in western Virginia where, not coincidentally, as a small boy (much younger than my onanistically-minded protagonist Newt), I explored with my second cousins a creek running through the woods where an old Civil War era furnace or bullet-refining kiln loomed….
Joseph Allen Boone

“The Gallery@CIRCUS Presents”

Book Reading and Signing

Joseph Boone – Furnace Creek/Conditions Of Precarity

8230 Santa Monica Blvd, Los Angeles, CA
Sun, Sep 15, 2024 | 2:00 pm

“From Literary Criticism to Creative Fiction”

Online Book Talk Series

Joseph Allen Boone’s Furnace Creek, a Novel

Inside the Center at the Stanford Humanities Center
Tue, Feb 6, 2024 | 1:00 pm

Where To Buy ?

Buy the Books From Amazon Store Now

— Michael Cunningham, Pulitzer Prize for The Hours

“A funny, moving, and true rendition of everybody’s story: surviving our childhoods, which can be uniquely challenging if you’re Southern, and queer. Boone is a natural novelist, and Furnace Creek is a genuine accomplishment.”

— Colm Tóibín, Author of The Master and The Magician

[This] ingenious re-telling and re-imagining of Dickens’’ Great Expectations . . . plays innocence against experience, youth against age, privilege against poverty, in an America of the 1960s. Its narrator is endearing and knowing and also, like the novelist, a born noticer.

— Publishers Weekly

“With lyric beauty, welcome frankness, and rare emotional urgency, Boone reimagines Dickens’ Great Expectations in the American South . . . with a queer perspective and countless new and illuminating approaches. Exquisite prose and a storyteller’s elan.”

— Kirkus Reviews

“Boone’s prose is lyrical and inventive, merging Dickensian wit and texture with a dash of Southern gothic. The characters are delicately drawn and elegantly complicated.”

— Marianne Wiggins, Pulitizer and National Book Award nominee for Evidence of Things Unseen

“A page-turning novel, a spirited American retelling of an English classic . . . . Boone brings both worlds vividly alive with his ebullient prose. A joyously ambitious debut!”

— Dana Johnson, Flannery O’Connor Award for Break Any Woman Down

“Furnace Creek has everything brilliant novels have . . . It is also wickedly funny, that rare novel full of charming humor and sharp cultural commentary at every turn.”

— Viet Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer

“A sweeping, Gothic tale of sex, race, and a young man’s education. I was totally entertained and, most of all, seduced.”

— Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, author of Becoming Dickens and The Turning Point: The Year that Changed Charles Dickens and the World

“A playful reimagining of Dickens, a tautly plotted thriller, a beautifully observed coming of age story: Furnace Creek . . . seizes you from the beginning and refuses to let you go.”

— Lewis di Simone, Gay and Lesbian Review International

“The love of literature hinges not just on beautiful writing but on an awareness that the stories of the past have a lot to teach us in the present. By transposing Dickens into our own era, Boone demonstrates just that—and also shows that those stories belong to all of us, regardless of our gender, sexuality, or time in history.”

— Barry Qualls, Southern Review of Literature

“The richness of [its] characters makes Furnace Creek work brilliantly. But more: Boone gives them stories that compel the reader to see them as individuals in a specific time and place. Boone’s writing . . . is at times lyrical, memorable, and always in service to the story.”

— Molly Engelhardt, Books Cover to Cover

No one can outdo Dickens when it comes to creating characters that hold; but what Dickens couldn’t do that Boone can is give [Great Expectations] a modern twist by exploring the inner life of his teenage protagonist, which is as turbulent as the times . . . A wonderful novel with psychological depth to match a period in American history that was both stormy and exhilarating. Boone is a masterful writer.”

— Greg Bills, author of Fearful Symmetry and Consider This Home

“No single review could possibly encompass the abundance of lives and life underway in [this] novel—nor should anyone wish it to. That’s why we read books like this one: to get happily lost in their capacious, prodigious pages. A satisfyingly substantial libation built upon a potent spirit.”

Furnace Creek Excerpt

Ch.1 : Bad Day at Furnace Creek

For years I didn’t realize why it was called furnace creek, even though I’d been uncovering bullets in the vicinity ever since I was old enough to explore the creek on my own. The bullets in question were misshapen slugs of Confederate vintage, buried in the flinty soil, scattered in the underbrush, and sometimes wedged between the rough-hewn slabs that made up the sides of that rocky mound built on the steep embankment overlooking the creek. Decades of creeping ivy and a skein of Virginia honeysuckle held the mound in place, frustrating any temptation that its roughened walls might harbor to tumble earthwards.....

That was the “furnace”—a towering outdoor stone oven in which molten lead had once been shaped into the slugs we kids showed off whenever we unearthed them from their recesses one hundred years later. It was one of the countless Civil War relics that haunted the mountains and valleys of Franklin County, reminders of a cause that, long since vanquished, stubbornly refused to vanish. But to my young fancy, the blackened furnace, hidden in the woods on the edge of town, looked more Egyptian than Confederate: it loomed in my childish imagination as a four-sided pyramid whose top had been whacked off twelve feet above the ground...

And whacking off was the fine art I learned there the summer of 1965, lying prone on those grim stones as furnace creek—taking its name from this landmark—churned and chortled through the forested landscape surrounding my perch In that initial onslaught of adolescence, as I was coming into my first and most vivid impressions of a wider world lying in wait just beyond the horizons of my vision, stealthy as a bobcat readying to pounce, I had found a haven for my solitary vice, so recently learned and so eagerly cultivated, on the top of that old relic. Stretched out on its summit and hidden by a shroud of greenery, visible only to unquiet jays hopping from branch to branch overhead, I found a refuge from the domestic surveillance that attended every creaking bedspring or locked bathroom door in my parents’ well-regulated house...

Here, dappled in sunlight that purified the act whose pleasure even then was obscurely related to the guilty suspicion that I ought not be doing what I so obviously wanted to do, I learned to bring myself to delirium with strokes as sensuous as those summer hours of daylight were long. That was the summer when semen still smelled astonishingly fresh, an elixir of unfathomed potency. That was the season of unmediated expectation, when the simple ecstasy of touch was all that was needed to bring me off again and again up in my leafy eyrie, my hideout from the world, ten-bike-minutes away from the chores I was avoiding at home...

How vividly I still remember the day I first came into a sense of my place in the world—that is, my place as something more culpable than a thirteen-year-old boy whose greatest misdeeds to date had been bullying his younger brother, tracking muddy prints across the newly waxed kitchen floor, neglecting his prayers. I was lying atop the furnace on that particularly blazing and humid July afternoon, shirtless and the elastic waistband of my shorts pushed to my knees....

It was that kind of hazy day when the air conspired to look as thick as it felt, so that the sweat generated by the humidity and compounded by my handy exertions swamped me in a lubricant as much a deterrent as a stimulus to satisfaction. My vision had gone white from staring at the sun straight overhead, and just as my pent-up labors verged on completion, a dark fist bore down on my chest, a rasping voice demanded.

“-GIVE ME YOUR NAME, BOY, QUICK!” —and my world turned upside down.

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