Justin Torres on "We the Animals"

To say that Justin Torres's fiction is animal is to say that it is sharp and tough, sinewy and graceful. The three boys who thunder through his prose are animal, too. These brothers, half Puerto-Rican, half white, are brazen with love and sometimes broken by a certain violence that punctuates their rural Upstate New York youth, taming, momentarily, their wildness. "We the Animals," published in 2012, is one of the most astonishing literary debuts in recent memory. Its 19 chapters read like interconnected stories, a taut and swift coming-of-age story with complications of sexuality that ultimately threaten the bonds of brotherhood and familial understanding. Torres, a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, a Wallace Stegner Fellow, and a recent Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University, has conceived a visceral, captivating, and devastating novel that sinks its teeth into readers' hearts and minds. Torres is joined by Booklist senior editor Donna Seaman.

This program is generously underwritten by Paula R. Kahn and is presented in partnership with the Writing Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Center on Halsted.