The Ticking Is the Bomb: A Memoir » (Unabridged)

Nick Flynn is the award-winning author of Some Ether, Blind Huber, The Ticking is the Bomb and Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, winner of the PEN/Martha Albrand Award. He divides his time between Texas, where he teaches at the University of Houston, and Brooklyn, New York.

"A beautiful, intelligent book that renders pain both ordinary and extraordinary into art."—Susanna Sonnenberg, San Francisco Chronicle

The Barnes & Noble Review

Fury may be among the most compelling emotions, but few writers are capable of harnessing its energy. The passion that propels one to pick up the pen is likely to impatiently sweep aside fundamentals like logic or style. All concern for the reader disappears in the immediacy of recording. Nick Flynn's The Ticking Is the Bomb brims with outrage -- at his government, his genes, his predilections, his very self. And when he's not raging, he is fearful, depressed, or aghast.

But Flynn is among those rare souls able to direct the course of his wrath: a poet by training and a Buddhist by disposition, he knows when to gun the engine, letting his passion infuse the prose, and when to pull back, casting an analytical eye on all he sees. In this memoir he has produced an angry book that's about more than just anger.