The Jugheads

(Paperback)

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Description

East Texas in the 1960s is not the worst place to have grown up, but for narrator Jake of The Jugheads, it was a minefield. Describing first jobs and first kisses, family vacations and family fights with unusual clarity and courage, Jake takes us through a wild ride of a coming of age tale, in an Ordinary American Family that is as violent and dysfunctional as they come. Despite his upwardly-mobile, working-class father Richard's draconian rule over the household, Jake manages to grow into his gifts as an artist and an athlete.

Reviews

J. R. Helton really speaks to me--starkly honest, darkly funny, acutely observant, and captures the tragic absurdity of human life. ... [H]es right up there with the best of them. Robert Crumb, cartoonist and musician

This guy Helton could be the next Bukowski.Terry Zwigoff, director of Crumb and Ghost World

If Mark Twain had snorted coke, chomped on painkillers like they were Tic Tacs and huffed enough nitrous to keep a fleet of dental surgery patients grinning,Drugsis the book hed have written.Tony ONeill, author of Digging the Vein and Sick City

Author Bio

J. R. Helton's first novel Drugs, a modern homage to William S. Burrough's classic Junky, introduced the world to his wry writing and unique genre of fictionalized memoir. A professor of writing at the collegiate level, Heltonhas also published two memoirs and a number of short stories-for one of which he won an Honorable Mention Pushcart Prize-and poems in such literary magazines asThe Sun,The Missouri Review, and Mineshaft. He lives, writes, and teaches in Texas.