(SIGNED) Running with Scissors

Augusten Burroughs

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Book cover for Running with Scissors
book cover image
Book cover for Running with Scissors

(SIGNED) Running with Scissors

(SIGNED) Running with Scissors

Augusten Burroughs

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Description

The #1 New York Times bestselling memoir from Augusten Burroughs, Running with Scissors, now a Major Motion Picture!

Running with Scissors is the true story of a boy whose mother (a poet with delusions of Anne Sexton) gave him away to be raised by her psychiatrist, a dead-ringer for Santa and a lunatic in the bargain. Suddenly, at age twelve, Augusten Burroughs found himself living in a dilapidated Victorian in perfect squalor. The doctor's bizarre family, a few patients, and a pedophile living in the backyard shed completed the tableau. Here, there were no rules, there was no school. The Christmas tree stayed up until summer, and Valium was eaten like Pez. And when things got dull, there was always the vintage electroshock therapy machine under the stairs....

Running with Scissors is at turns foul and harrowing, compelling and maniacally funny. But above all, it chronicles an ordinary boy's survival under the most extraordinary circumstances.

About the Author

Augusten Burroughs is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Dry, Magical Thinking, and, most recently, Possible Side Effects, which were also New York Times bestsellers. Augusten has been named one of the fifteen funniest people in America by Entertainment Weekly. He lives in New York City and western Massachusetts.

Critical Reviews

"I just finished reading the most amazing book. Running with Scissors is hilarious, freaky-deaky, berserk, controlled, transcendent, touching, affectionate, vengeful, all-embracing....It makes a good run at blowing every other [memoir] out of the water." --Carolyn See, The Washington Post

"Funny and rich with child's eye details of adults who have gone off the rails." --The New York Times Book Review

"It is as funny as it is twisted." --GQ

"A hilarious and horrifying memoir." --Los Angeles Times

"Harrowing and hilarious. I haven't laughed this much since David Sedaris's last book." --Haven Kimmel, author of A Girl Named Zippy

"Running with Scissors is a cut above...compelling...the book celebrates Burroughs' resilient, upbeat spirit, which helps him surmount one of the weirder childhoods on record." --USA Today

"The anecdotes can be so flippant, and so insanely funny (quite literally), that the effect is that of a William Burroughs situation comedy." --The New York Times

"Burroughs defies the 'woe is me' stigma of modern memoir with a raucous recounting of his loony teenage years." --Entertainment Weekly

"I was reminded of Roald Dahl's Boy and A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Augusten Burroughs has produced a memoir that's funny and sharp but also humane, as charming as it is revealing." --Kurt Andersen, author of Turn of the Century

"A memoir that is both horrifying and mordantly funny." --San Francisco Chronicle

"Burroughs has memorialized his bizarre childhood showing off a dark wit that often rivals that 0of David Sedaris--while telling a true story that would make even Sedaris cringe." --New York Magazine

"Burroughs tempers the pathos with sharp riotous humor... Edgier, but reminiscent of Dave Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, this is a survival story readers won't forget." --Booklist

Publishing Information

Publisher: Picador USA
Pub date: 2003-06-01
Length: 336 pages

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