World's Largest Man

<p><strong>Winner of the Thurber Prize</strong></p><p><strong>How in the hell is this so funny one second and so heartbreaking the next? Harrison Scott Key examines the topic of fatherhood and sonhood with fresh clear eyes. . . except wait they're not clear because they filled with tears of laughter one second and sadness the next. I dare you to find a better way to spend the seconds and minutes and hours of your day than with this book. -- Tom Franklin <em>New York Times</em> bestselling author of <em>Crooked Letter Crooked Letter</em></strong></p><p><strong>The riotous tender story of a bookish Mississippi boy and his flawed Bunyanesque father told with the comic verve of David Sedaris and the deft satire of Mark Twain or Roy Blount Jr.</strong></p><p>Harrison Scott Key was born in Memphis but he grew up in Mississippi among pious Bible-reading women and men who either shot things or got women pregnant. At the center of his world was his larger-than-life father--a hunter a fighter a football coach a man better suited to living in a remote frontier wilderness of the nineteenth century than contemporary America with all its progressive ideas and paved roads and lack of armed duels. He was a great man and he taught me many things: How to fight how to work how to cheat how to pray to Jesus about it how to kill things with guns and knives and if necessary with hammers.</p><p>Harrison with his love of books and excessive interest in hugging couldn't have been less like Pop and when it became clear that he was not able to kill anything very well or otherwise make his father happy he resolved to become everything his father was not: an actor a Presbyterian and a doctor of philosophy. But when it was time to settle down and start a family of his own Harrison started to view his father in a new light and realized--for better and for worse--how much of his old man he'd absorbed.</p><p>Sly heartfelt and tirelessly hilarious <em>The World's Largest Man</em> is an unforgettable memoir--the story of a boy's struggle to reconcile himself with an impossibly outsized role model a grown man's reckoning with the father it took him a lifetime to understand.</p>