PRAISE FOR THE SISTERS BROTHERS

“A powerfully realized work of narrative fiction... the dialogue is sharp as a whip... the novel works artfully within its formal boundaries to explore the nature of brotherhood, work, love, greed, loneliness and personal renewal.” -- Times Literary Supplement

“Bursting with vitality and driven along by a terrific pulpy energy.” -- Glasgow Herald

“By turns hilarious, graphic and meditative, The Sisters Brothers hooked me from page one all the way to 300 — and I could have stayed on for many more.” -- NPR.org

"I’m a big fan of the revisionist western, but none I’ve read are as funny and strange, or as oddly warm, as Patrick DeWitt’s The Sisters Brothers."-- Outside

"Weirdly funny, startlingly violent and steeped in sadness... It’s all rendered irresistible by Eli Sisters, who narrates with a mixture of melancholy and thoughtfulness... After capturing the fireside camps and saloons in perfectly drawn vignettes, deWitt strips these two lethal brothers of more than they ever thought a man could lose. And then, damned if he doesn’t surprise us again with a twilight scene that’s just miraculously lovely." -- Washington Post

"There never was a more engaging pair of psychopaths than Charlie and Eli Sisters... So subtle is deWitt’s prose, so slyly note-perfect his rendition of Eli’s voice in all its earnestly charming 19th-century syntax, and so compulsively readable his bleakly funny western noir story, that readers will stick by Eli even as he grinds his heel into the shattered skull of an already dead prospector." -- Macleans

"Fresh, hilariously anti-heroic, often genuinely chilling, and relentlessly compelling. Yes, this is a mighty fine read, and deWitt a mighty fine writer."-- National Post

"DeWitt never loses focus nor misses a beat in what is a masterclass on the twists of the mind and heart."
-- The Scotsman

"(A) great success both in the “literary” sense of a beautiful written and emotionally compelling (novel), and in the sense that it is a genuinely badass Western... Eli’s narration is at turns darkly hilarious and surprisingly moving... DeWitt’s prose is sharp, insightful, funny and immensely fun. But the novel also asks serious existentialist questions about the horrors and absurdity of life... DeWitt’s novel should satisfy a fan of Louis L’Amour as easily as a fan of Sam Lipsyte. And the great thing about a writer like Patrick deWitt is that you have no idea what kind of novel he will write next, but you know it will be worth checking out."
-- The Faster Times

"Hilarious, dark, twisted and compelling." -- Canada Arts Connect Magazine

"DeWitt writes with clarity, both with respect to his characters and the time and place through which they travel... It doesn't take long for the reader to become invested in Eli — in his hopes, worries, questions and doubts... He is a warm narrator telling a story that is original, entrancing and entertaining." -- Denver Post

"The writing is superb, with each brief chapter a separate tale in itself, relayed in Eli's aphoristic fashion. The scope is both cinematic and schematic, with a swaggering, poetic feel reminiscent of a Bob Dylan lyric, while the author retains gleefully taut control of the overall structure... In The Sisters Brothers, a diabolical combination of Laurel and Hardy and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (with a touch of Don Quixote and Sanch Panza, just to emphasise the high literary stakes) deWitt has ensured another unforgettable pair their place in fictive lore." -- The Sunday Telegraph

"DeWitt’s many levels and story lines form a wickedly funny and innovative novel that amounts to an adventure using various genres and forms of narration." -- Roanoke Times

"The Sisters Brothers is a supremely confident, compelling, absorbing and brilliantly maintained blend of Deadwood, Elmore Leonard, and Laurel and Hardy's darker, more tragic twins. It is startling, moving, poetically and farcically funny and, at the last, terribly sad. It's an extraordinary piece of work."
-- Niall Griffiths, author of Grits

"The narrative is thought-provoking and even considering the violence; there is always the division between the ever-present evils and the fight for humanity. The didactic between the bad and the good is distorted throughout the novel, which is partially how readers can manage to love even the most suspect of characters... While there is a great deal of dark humor throughout the novel, it remains edgy and unyielding... The novel is likeable on many levels, but particularly to note is deWitt’s ability to engage different audiences through the various characters." -- The Weekender

“Wandering his Western landscape with the cool confidence of a practiced pistoleer, deWitt’s steady hand belies a hair trigger, a poet’s heart and an acute sense of gallows humor…the reader is likely to reach the adventure’s end in the same shape as Eli: wounded but bettered by the ride.” -- Time Out New York

“The Sisters Brothers is like your favorite meal: full of unique yet familiar flavors, easily digestible but still filling. It evokes a time and place in your memory without being exactly of that time and place—a feeling you revel in the re-creation of even more than you would enjoy going back to the original experience at its source.” -- The Stranger

"Hugely entertaining... a blackly comic fable." -- Financial Times

"(An) unsettling, compelling and deeply strange picaresque novel." -- Independent on Sunday

"Every so often, a novel arrives so worthy of praise that I can't help feeling a bit inadequate to the task... The Sisters Brothers is such a book. I devoured the novel over consecutive enchanted evenings. Violent, funny and strangely touching, it's destined for a spot on many best of 2011 lists." -- Edmonton Journal

"DeWitt has invigorated this well-worn path with wit, style, and imagination... The Sisters Brothers manages the difficult trick of making a vicious killer so endearing that you are rooting for him and his dream of a peaceful existence by the end."-- New West

"A stunningly accomplished book: a rip-roaring romp around the insanely violent Wild West, with more genuinely funny bits than you can shake a Stetson at. With this novel, deWitt proves that he is... well on his way to greatness." -- Dazed and Confused

"Like an alchemist, deWitt has refined and purified the base metals of black comedy and the western to produce literary gold." -- Winnipeg Free Press

"Patrick deWitt shows the west in every grimy, violent cuss-laden detail: spider-filled boots, tooth rot, as well as western standards like gambling, double-dealing, superstitions and duels. However, the best westerns are not the sum of their gunfights, but the pauses between them, and The Sisters Brothers is no exception... (It has a) cadence and flow to its prose and the reader can almost hear Eli’s laconic narration as the pages turn... In the days of cutthroat-priced ebooks, here is a hardcover that practically holds a Colt to your head and growls: read me." -- Winnipeg Review

"At first I couldn't quite figure out what it was about The Sisters Brothers that was so different. Then I caught a glance of myself in the mirror and realized I was smiling." -- Big Issue

"The Sisters Brothers... conjures a different kind of gothic gore... mined from the same place that must have inspired “Deadwood,” Blood Meridian, Waiting For Godot, High Plains Drifter, Don Quixote, Ambrose Bierce, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Tarantino, Jack London, Sam Peckinpaw, True Grit, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Apocalypse Now and even The Canterbury Tales with a touch of Laurel and Hardy. It's a violent world, one where the forces of destiny, nature, familial cruelty, human rage and greed play out around this pair of strangely funny mismatched homicidal brothers as they grapple with the frustrations and indignities of lame horses, substandard dentistry, possible witchcraft and hostile gold-miners." -- Hartford Advocate

"Brilliant... a terrifically spun yarn with a satisfyingly absurd reversal-of-fortune ending. The Western has been spoofed perhaps more than any genre, but never quite in such a masterfully strange and wonderful way as this." -- Toronto Star

“(A) thrilling, smart and surprisingly touching read…visual and visceral…always compelling and surprising.”
-- BOOKPAGE

"Weirdly beautiful... mesmerizing... the book seduces us to its characters, and draws us on the strength of deWitt's subtle, nothing-wasted prose." -- Cleveland Plain Dealer

"Masterfully written... you could write a dissertation on The Sisters Brothers, as complex and nuanced as they are." -- Chamber Four

"Downright cinematic... deliciously original and rhapsodically funny." -- Boston Globe

"Blackly hilarious." -- The Times (UK)

"DeWitt has lost none of his ability to distill an image with a couple of well-chosen words, and the precision and intensity of his language gives Sisters a dreamlike aura. This is not because of any soft-focus fuzziness: The narration is so clear and solid in the objects and people it treats, and so effective at eliminating ambiguity in the described physical world and in the rhythms of conversation, it seems to hoard shades of gray."
-- Philadelphia City Paper

"Some books are an unadulterated pleasure from start to finish. The Sisters Brothers is one such book... a frequently hilarious, moving, occasionally profound western that entertains, provokes and thrills. Heartily, heartily recommended." -- Bookmunch

"If Cormac McCarthy had a sense of humor, he might have concocted a story like Patrick deWitt's bloody, darkly funny western The Sisters Brothers... It's smooth and seamless, shot through with dark humor, pared and antique without being Baroque... There is something very human in all this blood and guts... This humanness, with the humanness that Eli is growing into, give the novel a warmth and depth... DeWitt has shifted here radically, successfully... a skillfully polished voice and a penchant for gleefully looking under bloody bandages." -- Los Angeles Times

“Thrilling…a lushly voiced picaresque story…so richly told, so detailed, that what emerges is a weird circus of existence, all steel shanks and ponies, gut shots and medication poured into the eyeholes of the dying. At some level, this too is a kind of revenge story, marvelously blurry.” -- ESQUIRE

“Both homage to the classic Western and knife thrust to its dark underbelly, this novel has a quirky, deadpan exterior and a hard-beating heart; we come to see how men die and how the brotherlybond shifts but holds.... I was intrigued by page one.” -- LibraryJournal

“A masterful, hilarious picaresque that keeps company with the best of Charles Portis and Mark Twain, The Sisters Brothers is a relentlessly absorbing feat of novelistic art.”
-- Wells Tower, author of Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned

"(DeWitt is) a character conjurer like none other... His creations are outlandish, rogue and delightfully bizarre, but as full of the same blood, guts, hopes, fears and dreams as the rest of us... deWitt lines up a classic Old West road story and steps back, letting his characters sing for him. Damned if it ain't grand." -- Filter

“A gorgeous, wise, riveting work of, among other things, cowboy noir. Comic, too, but of the species that arrives bearing a scorpion's stinger. You smile, then you wince, then you turn the page to find out what happens next, happily disarmed all the while by the voice of Eli Sisters as he puzzles his way back to humanity. Honestly, I can’t recall ever being this fond of a pair of psychopaths.”
-- David Wroblewski, author of The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

“DeWitt has produced a genre-bending frontier saga that is exciting, funny, and, perhaps unexpectedly, moving.” -- Publishers Weekly, starred review

"The Sisters Brothers revisits the Old West with a darkly comic, distinctly contemporary sensibility. Patrick deWitt's narrator –a hired killer with a bad conscience and a melancholy disposition– is a brilliant and memorable creation." -- Tom Perrotta, author of Little Children

"DeWitt integrates his own brand of craziness into the pre-existing craziness that is part and parcel of the Western. He throws literal truth aside to free up the way for emotional truth... the world is fascinating, the character are rich and clichés be there none." -- Electric Literature (The Outlet)

“At once dark and touching, The Sisters Brothers has something on every page to make you laugh. Patrick deWitt has given us a gift, reimagining the old west in a thoroughly original manner. Readers are all the better for it.”-- Charles Bock, author of Beautiful Children

"An instant classic. Thrilling, hilarious, touching, and unforgettable. The Sisters Brothers is the best Western I've read in years and further proof that deWitt is a writer we should all be very excited about."-- Jonathan Evison, author of West of Here

"This book is full of surprises... an inventive and ingenious character study." -- Dallas Morning News

“DeWitt creates a homage to life in the Wild West but at the same time reveals its brutality.” -- Kirkus Reviews

"In perfect measures of light, darkness, and firelit reflection, The Sisters Brothers engagingly renews the comic novel in a spirit by turns lawless and corrective. This ever-surprising story is dead serious fun." -- Michael Helm, author of Cities of Refuge

"Eli is... a wonderful, enigmatic character... (deWitt) pegs the back and forth sibling rivalry with that just right mix of sarcasm and grudging respect... It’s funny, mean and, on the very rare occasion, tender... In the end, The Sisters Brothers is the flip side of the new Western – part tall tales and violence, part philosophical musing, part comic reinvention." -- Three Guys One Book

“A bright, brutal revision of the Western, The Sisters Brothers offers an unexpected meditation on life, and on the crucial difference between power and strength.”
-- Gil Adamson, author of The Outlander

PRAISE FOR ABLUTIONS

"The success of Ablutions stems from deWitt's old-fashioned writerly exactitude. His sentences often depict brutal events, and their cumulative effect can be mind-numbingly horrific, but they are crafted with a rare degree of care and display a truly original voice."
--Barnes & Noble Review << READ THE ENTIRE REVIEW

"(DeWitt) crafts a narrative of precise subtlety and seemingly effortless invention."
-- The Believer << READ THE ENTIRE REVIEW

"DeWitt conjures up moments of both painful humor and tender beauty." --Financial Times

"Deeply affecting... Ablutions' revelation is the freshness of deWitt's prose... The book strikes me as a marvel." -- L.A. Weekly

"Read this rambling and gloriously downbeat novel... Melancholic, sentimental, and very funny." -- Harper's Bazaar (UK)

"Patrick deWitt's sensitive and hilariously deadpan portrayals of assorted human detritus, juxtaposed with the narrator's struggle for an alcohol-free identity, makes this an instant classic of boozy literature. When you read Ablutions, you get to walk through the fire with deWitt himself, and to share in a spiritual resurrection that would have made Lazarus proud." --Dazed and Confused

"This unusual and forceful account of bottle-to-mouth living is still weirdly engrossing, and the precise observations drip with black humor." -- New Statesman

"DeWitt's unsparing writing is so clear and unfussy - and so punctuated with tiny, heartbreaking moments of grace - it becomes impossible to put the book down and abandon your narrator to face that world alone." -- Portland Mercury

"Patrick deWitt's hilariously gloomy tale is a sober reminder to stick to the diet tonic water... The subtitle is "notes for a novel", but there is nothing unfinished about Ablutions. The sentences catch the light like drops of Jameson whiskey spilled as a drunk rushes for a puke." -- The Independent

"Ablutions... reminds us that a writer with enough talent can approach the most familiar paths to the most familiar destinations, step into the rough, and find a way to walk there that surprises the hell out of the most jaded reader... The writing is just that startling, that precise, that good." -- Hobart

"Like all novelists who write successfully about Los Angeles, deWitt is susceptible to the city's peculiar horrors. We are lucky he is willing to transcribe them."
-- Wunderkammer

"The novel is a twenty-four carat beauty... DeWitt more than warrants his place on the list of the dozen or so writers to watch in the future." -- Bookmunch

"Startlingly honest... Ablutions is a revelation unlike any other into the gritty effects that drugs, alcoholism, and most of all loneliness can have on the human spirit." --Aesthetica

"DeWitt elevates his grubby, often comic tale and its lost inhabitants with a veneer of elegiac sadness without feeling the need to reach towards redemption."-- Metro

"Viciously hilarious... An accessible, side-splitting story... Its strange and funny declarations evoke much more than a drinker's life... A welcome rarity: an experimental novel that's also a page-turner." --Time Out New York

"DeWitt's writing is sharp and bitter and funny." --The LA Times

"Stunningly depicted. . . DeWitt writes beautifully about ugliness, and his book casts a haunting spell." -- Booklist

"A brilliant inside view of addiction." --The Times (London)

"A brief, intense and carefully sustained piece of writing about the blurry edges of existence, shot though with remarkable lucidity. Warning: Cheers it isn't." -- Guardian

"Ablutions is an unstinting book about drinking and drugging that will inevitably draw comparisons to Charles Bukowski and Denis Johnson, but deWitt's clipped and grimly humorous observations of the doomed are also reminiscent of Hunter S. Thompson in his prime." --Boldtype

"Ablutions is like an intense art-house movie, where the lead actor is in every scene but makes the whole thing sparkle with his star power." -- The Oregonian

"Ablutions aches with honesty." --Hot Metal Bridge

"A hypnotic cross between Lorrie Moore and Denis Johnson." -- The Seattle Weekly

"Patrick deWitt's writing is deeply charismatic -- a coiled ramble of note perfect sentences, mysterious and burbling declarative tones, the saddest humor imaginable, and the strange physical proportions of a magician's top hat. I was equally taken aback by the needling brilliance that surfaces at its every turn and riveted by the brains and heart it must have taken to finesse such a clearly broken down yet perfectly clear and penetrating world. I love this novel very much." -- Dennis Cooper
<< CLICK HERE for Ablutions Day on DC's blog.

"The best book I've read in ages, Ablutions is like a perfect cocktail - a heady concoction of debauchery, poetry, and incredible insight. It keeps you clinging night after night to its pages, like a parched alcoholic clinging to the bottle." -- Richard Milward, author of Apples

"DeWitt's dirty realism makes me want to roll in the mud with him. Brilliant."
-- Gary Shteyngart, author of Absurdistan

"Ablutions is an astonishingly original and blackly comic debut novel." -- Iain Sinclair, Big Issue

"Patrick deWitt is the 21st century poet of Hollywood's desperate souls, the misbegotten, broken, and the lost. He writes with a fierce compassion about people treading the vague boundary between homicide and self-destruction, loveless sex and sexless love, all lined up and looking into our own culturally shared abyss. Beware, beware. But read Ablutions."
--Chris Offutt, author of No Heroes: A Memoir of Coming Home

"Ablutions is funny and precarious, a novel that shifts the ground under the reader's feet, a naked-lightbulb self-examination that doesn't shy from high comedy. DeWitt has a gimlet eye and a dead aim with words."-- Luc Sante, author of Low Life

"Ablutions is a novel about the deteriorating health of our livers and the malaise of our dreams. Perverse in its humor, but ultimately about our potential for redemption, it's riotously funny and cripplingly sad all at the same time. Patrick deWitt takes on our diseases and depravity with prose that may yet rescue us from the gutter." -- Salvador Plascencia, author of The People of Paper