Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    The Half-Life: A Novel
    Unavailable
    The Half-Life: A Novel
    Unavailable
    The Half-Life: A Novel
    Ebook433 pages6 hours

    The Half-Life: A Novel

    By Jon Raymond

    3/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    When Cookie Figowitz, the cook for a party of volatile fur trappers trekking through the Oregon Territory in the 1820s, joins up with the refugee Henry Brown, the two begin a wild ride that takes them from the virgin territory of the West all the way to China and back again. One hundred and sixty years later, Tina Plank, an unhappy teenager, meets Trixie, a girl with a troubled past, and the two become fast friends. But when two skeletons are accidentally unearthed from their common ground, the lives of Tina and Trixie, Cookie and Henry are brought together in unexpected and startling ways.
    Jonathan Raymond attended Swarthmore College. He was an editor at Plazm magazine and received his M.F.A. from New School University. He currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.
    "A marvelous novel...a mystery as rich as the history of the Oregon territory itself."-Vanity Fair
    "Raymond nimbly interweaves these parallel tales and manages to surprise...[a] subtle portrait of friendship and loss...[from] an astute, patient observer."-Entertainment Weekly
    "Raymond's debut novel teems with carefully researched period details, intrigue...yet it never feels overstuffed."-Washington Post
    "With The Half-Life, [Raymond] has come home prospecting for literary gold ...Oregon has given him something back."-San Francisco Chronicle
    "Quietly stunning...Raymond is a kind of stealth bomber of the epic."-Newsday
    "Terrific...The Half-Life gazes upon those fierce but ephemeral attachments that evade the history books. Multiple plots elegantly veer across the sprawling terrain."-Village Voice
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury USA
    Release dateDec 2, 2008
    ISBN9781596918870
    Unavailable
    The Half-Life: A Novel
    Author

    Jon Raymond

    Jon Raymond is the author of the novels The Half-Life, Rain Dragon, and Freebird, and the story collection Livability, winner of the Oregon Book Award. He has collaborated on six films with the director Kelly Reichardt, including Old Joy, Wendy and Lucy, Meek’s Cutoff, Night Moves, First Cow, and the forthcoming Showing Up, numerous of which have been based on his fiction. He also received an Emmy Award nomination for his screenwriting on the HBO miniseries Mildred Pierce directed by Todd Haynes and starring Kate Winslet. He was the editor of Plazm Magazine, associate and contributing editor at Tin House magazine, and a member of the Board of Directors at Literary Arts. His writing has appeared in Zoetrope, Playboy, Tin House, The Village Voice, Artforum, Bookforum, and other places. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

    Read more from Jon Raymond

    Related to The Half-Life

    Related ebooks

    Romance For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Off-kilter Classic

      Mar 18, 2024

      by Kerry Andrew (Atlantic Books, $36.99) One summer, William Low sends his four children to his house in the south of France. He’ll join them when he’s finished his business in China. The siblings have different mothers – the older two, Luke and Con

      2 min read

    • Article

      The Pandemic Can’t Lock Down Nature

      Apr 9, 2020

      Needing to clear my head, I went down to the Penobscot River. There they were, swimming with the mergansers, following an early pulse of river herring to the mouth of Kenduskeag stream: two harbor seals, raising sleek round heads for a few long breat

      4 min read

    • Article

      Around The World In 100 Plants

      Oct 26, 2022

      Simon Barnes (Simon & Schuster, £30) WE have become used, in recent years, to the convention of 100 short essays as a means of raising the reader’s eyebrows and setting away a never-ending series of big ideas from the starting point of an everyday o

      5 min read

    • Article

      Commonplace Book

      Mar 4, 2024

      To Err Is Human; to Forgive, Supine —S. J. Perelman, Baby, It’s Cold Inside, 1970 You must know the bees have come early this year too: I see them visit aster, sweet Williams, bleeding hearts, and azalea blossoms hardy enough to not have crisped with

      3 min read

    • Article

      New Titles

      Oct 10, 2018

      By George Keithley George Braziller, Inc. “The Donner Party is one of the three or four finest book-length American poems ever written.”—Poetry. “Out of the western migration of the 1840s…Keithley has made a lean, taut narrative poem that moves with

      9 min read

    • Article

      The Last Naturalist

      Mar 1, 2022

      The Last Naturalist
      21 min read

    • Article

      The Healing Power Of Love

      Aug 20, 2020

      The Healing Power Of Love
      4 min read

    • Article

      Books

      Sep 12, 2022

      Books
      6 min read

    • Article

      'The Seabird's Cry' Follows The 350 Bird Species Inhabiting The Coastlines And Open Oceans Of Our Planet

      Feb 8, 2018

      It's a completely pitiless world, in which the attrition of natural predation is increased exponentially by the harshness of the environment.

      3 min read

    • Article

      The Supreme Act Of Trust

      Aug 10, 2022

      The Supreme Act Of Trust
      5 min read

    • Article

      Hook, Line And Sinker

      Oct 18, 2018

      Hook, Line And Sinker
      4 min read

    • Article

      Books

      Nov 14, 2022

      Limberlost begins with a whale, not a marlin: an almost-mythical beast at the mouth of a Tasmanian river, troubling the waves with its fluked tail. But Robbie Arnott’s third novel carries echoes of Ernest Hemingway’s masterpiece. As its hero pits him

      3 min read

    • Article

      Nature Books For Autumn Nights

      Sep 6, 2020

      Director of the Edinburgh International Book Festival H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald VINTAGE I can’t think of another nature book that carries such emotional complexity. As much as this is a riveting account of how one woman trained a mighty goshaw

      4 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Ayşegül Savaş

      Dec 12, 2018

      In the bleakest days of the year, I read Ágota Kristóf’s The Notebook, about twin brothers living in a Hungarian village with their grandmother during the war. They orient themselves in the world with a bizarre and unflinching ethics which, for its v

      3 min read

    • Article

      Tuesday New Release Day: Starring Orner, Dermansky, Simic, Tate, and More

      Jul 2, 2019

      Sexy satire, a biography of the semicolon, and the latest collection from a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet are just a few of the new reads out this week. The post Tuesday New Release Day: Starring Orner, Dermansky, Simic, Tate, and More appeared first o

      8 min read

    • Article

      Escapism In The Wild

      May 1, 2019

      Location. Location. Location. Even for books? Do thriller novels set in the Adirondacks use that setting to tell their stories? Thrillers are full of surprises and my first one came before I even turned a page. I found nine Adirondack thrillers publi

      3 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Matt Seidel

      Dec 9, 2017

      I tend to buy used books in bunches, which means the haul from some expeditions stays buried for weeks, months, years even. For this entry, I highlight three finds that, breaking custom, I bought and read almost immediately this year: Hugo Charteris’

      6 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Half-Life

    3/5

    2 ratings1 review

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 3/5
      I slogged through this, forgetting how much better a book could be until I started the next one. There are two parallel stories, both set in the same landscape near Portland, Oregon, one during the frontier period in the mid-nineteenth century, the other on a commnity of aging hippies in the 1980s. The first, by far the more interesting story, relates the friendship between two men, one a cook for trapping expeditions. They cook up a scheme to get rich by selling vials of a glandular extract from beavers in China. There "Cookie" is arrested, put in prison, & abandoned by his friend, who returns to America. Eventually Cookie befriends the Chinese prisoner in the next cell, brings him to American when they are released, only to encounter tragedy. In the other story, two teenaged girls become friends, smoke a lot of pot, & plan to make a film, before, again, tragedy occurs. In both friendships, the person of stronger character is thoroughly dominated by the one who is apparently stronger but fundamentally weaker. In that, the story had potential, but it didn't work very well. (The stories are loosely & ineffectively linked by an awkward story about finding two long abandoned bodies (both male, holding hands) on the property the girls are living on & a dispute over whether the bodies should be turned over to a forensic anthropologist or to local Indians.) The writer got carried away with descriptions, crossing the fine line, for me, between providing the details necessary to bring the characters & their attempts to life, or indulging oneself as a writer in displaying one's powers of description to no useful end. It was also a profance book, not just in the sense of being filled with profanity & drug use, but in that it sees life itself as tragic & unredeemable rather than, as Shakespeare & other great writers do, seeing that SOME people have tragic flaws that prevent them from reaping life's rewards.