CUYAHOGA

“Cuyahoga defies all modest description: It's deliriously fun to read: nonstop laughs, pages that whiz by, and a style that seems to gather up and beautify an entire history of American bullshit artistry... Cuyahoga is ten feet tall if it's an inch, and it's a ramshackle joy from start to finish.” —Brian Phillips, author of Impossible Owls “Pete Beatty's glorious Cuyahoga is a booming hymn of history, a praisesong both somber and funny This unlikely, beautiful novel sings with a heart as big as its subject, and with sentences that demand your complete and total attention.” –Jessica Anthony, author of Enter the Aardvark “As comically genius as a Coen Brothers film; with narrative skill and voice as singular as Faulkner... Page by page, I felt like the top of my head had blown off: even the most seemingly thrown-away lines left me astonished at their efficiency and beauty.” —Natalie Jenner, author of The Jane Austen Society

"Hear ye, hear ye: Cuyahoga is a singular feat of language and energized inventive storytelling. In Big Son, I met a mythic American hero, and in his brother Meed, a gifted, indelible raconteur. It learned me much about the Ohio frontier and America's historic establishing, not to mention, I damn near cracked my funny bones laughing. This marvelous tragicomic tale impressed upon my head and heart—twin joys." ---Mitchell S. Jackson author of Survival Math

Longlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award

“Beatty evokes the familiarities of genre, history and place while drafting them for a wild new context. In this regard, Cuyahoga is a breezy fable of empire, class, conquest and ecocide Beatty revels in fabulizing a region he clearly knows and loves.” —New York Times Book Review “Pete Beatty's very funny, rambunctious debut novel, Cuyahoga could be read with pleasure in 2002, or 1950. Or 1837, when most of it is set. It's a satire of tall tales, but not a distant, too-cool treatment. Beatty, a Cleveland-area native, deeply inhabits the tone and style of the form, paying sidelong homage to an essential American genre A healthy society might stand to be more skeptical of the myth-making that creates such figures. But in the society we have, they endure, and Beatty wrings absurd and serious pleasure from them.” —Los Angeles Times “Entertaining, rambunctious, and touching [Big Son is] the most extraordinary hero in Ohio's history, a hero hitherto unknown and unsung (and, admittedly, fictional) Cuyahoga is filled with memorable characters Rough-hewn and ribald, uproarious and affecting, Beatty's novel is a singular piece of work. Big Son is a frontier demigod in the mold of Paul Bunyan, Pecos Bill, and Davy Crockett, but far more poignantly drawn than any of them The book's dialogue is wonderfully idiosyncratic, its asides surprisingly insightful A great read set in a great city, Cuyahoga is tragic and comic, hilarious and inventive — a 19th-century legend for 21st-century America.” —Boston Globe “A light-hearted parody of America's founding mythologies,” —The Wall Street Journal "A hilarious and moving exploration of family, home, and fate ... you won't read anything else like it this year.” —Buzzfeed, most anticipated “It's worth mentioning how much fun there is to be had with Cuyahoga, a lot of which will provoke out-loud laughter. The robust yarn's patron spirits would include Twain and Charles (True Grit) Portis. Beatty has fashioned a true picaresque accomplishment,” —Artsfuse "A boisterous adventure." —The Millions, most anticipated “A rollicking, inventive, satirical twist on fables and tall tales with an engrossing style of prose and humor that critics have compared to John Barth, Thomas Pynchon and Charles Portis.” —Cleveland Scene “Pete Beatty's exhilarating, laugh-out-loud debut novel, ‘Cuyahoga,' gives birth to literature's next great tall-tale hero, Big Son,” —Southern Review of Books "Really good: boldly conceived, imaginatively written and wholly original Following in the fantastical footsteps of novelists such as John Barth and Thomas Pynchon, Beatty uses his home state as a jumping-off point for a wild, far-fetched tale Most satisfying is Beatty's redolent prose.” —Columbus Dispatch "An improbable, downright preposterous yarn ably spun and a great entertainment for a time in need of laughter.” —Kirkus, starred review