Tales out of school

by Benjamin Taylor

Tales Out of School is the story of the Mehmels, privileged and eccentric and headed into shipwreck, and of fourteen-year-old Felix, last of their line, who takes his rise from the family ruin. The place is Galveston Island. The season is summer. The year is 1907. Erotic as it is spiritual, homely as it is exalted, insistently comical as it is deeply sad, a book of life's inevitable opposites, Tales Out School establishes Benjamin Taylor in the forefront of serious contemporary fiction and testifies to a vivid potential in previously unexplored byways of the American heritage.