Selected Praise for ‘The Light Years’

“The Light Years is more than a queer coming-of-age story.  It’s a quest for the divine…filled with sentences lit from the inside, like Rush’s paintings.”

—Alexander Chee, Time

 

“A lucid miracle of a literary masterpiece…the wildest memoir I ever read…How did Rush write a first book in such dazzling, sparkling prose—incredible deft in execution, so precise and artistic in naturalistic description—so loving in human portraiture?  How did he get brought from the desert, to share with us this light?”

—Luke Goebel, Vice

 

“As mythic and wild with love, possibility, and danger as the decades it spans, you’ll read The Light Years with your breath held.  Brutal, buoyant, and wise to the tender terror of growing up, Chris Rush has written a timeless memoir of boyhood in the American Wilderness.”

—Emma Cline, author of The Girls

 

“This stunningly beautiful, original memoir is driven by a search for the divine, a quest that leads Rush into some dangerous places . . . The Light Years is funny, harrowing, and deeply tender.” 

—Kate Tuttle, The L.A. Times     

 

“Insanely entertaining.” 

—John Waters, filmmaker and author of Mr. Know-It-All and Liarmouth