Runner-up is another novel on the same theme: BENT ROAD (Dutton, $25.95), in which Lori Roy observes the breakdown of a family that has moved to Kansas to escape racial tensions in 1960s Detroit.
A sign identifying Bent Road had been stolen so many times, he said, that it had been secured on top of a nearly 20-foot-high pole in an attempt to make it more unreachable.
In Lori Roy's haunting first novel, BENT ROAD (Dutton, $25.95), Arthur Scott tries to escape the volatile racial climate of Detroit in 1967 by moving his wife and three children to the tiny Kansas town he left after the violent death of his sister 25 years earlier.
Bent scored at Carrow road as well.
And besides, they were fine stories, about his home, the West, the dusty roads and dry, bent-grass hills and basalt cliffs, about driving out before dawn to hunt ducks, the sweet, aching mysteries of the poky little towns.
The chaps on the motorcycles are getting murdered on lonely northern roads, the local bobbies are all bent as hell, as well as drunk as hell.
For "Babel" "we pulled ourselves off the road to record and at first we were kind of bent, and torn, like we wanted to be on the road really," Mr. Mumford said.
The tallest four bents attached to the road deck were too tall to go through the opening of the bottle, but were attached to the deck with a flexible white glue called Crafter's Pick Ultimate, which gave the bents the flexibility to bend without breaking as they were inserted.
That is how the novel sounded to me, at any rate, and McCarthy's bent for the apocalyptic — most naked in "The Road" (2006), a greater work by far — suffers a curious transformation in the hands of the Coens.
CARPENDALE, Australia — The smashed remains of Kapernick's Bridge — with its bent guardrails and a hanging concrete slab where road once was — are as sure a sign as any that the Lockyer Valley's decade-long drought is finished.
