What is Willy Vlautin reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Willy Vlautin, author of Don't Skip Out on Me.

His entry begins:

A Kestrel for a Knave by Barry Hines

A novel of such power and sadness its unforgettable. I’ve read it a handful of times over the years and always it’s a heartbreaking marvel. The story of Billy Casper, a kid from a broken home, who’s only future after school is a job in a coal mine. Set in a bleak mining community in an unnamed northern UK town, Billy is an outcast both at home and school. His only friend is a kestrel he has trained and keeps in a shed. A bird that flies above the sadness of the world, a bird free from the working-class constraints of spending one’s life in...[read on]

About Don't Skip Out on Me, from the publisher:

Horace Hopper has spent most of his life on a Nevada sheep ranch, but dreams of something bigger. Mr. and Mrs. Reese, the aging ranchers, took him in and treated him like a son, intending to leave the ranch in his hands. But Horace, ashamed not only of his half-Paiute, half-Irish heritage, but also of the fact his parents did not want him, feels as if he doesn’t belong on the ranch, or anywhere. Knowing he needs to make a name for himself, he decides to leave the only loving home he’s known to prove his worth as a championship boxer.

Mr. Reese is holding on to a way of life that is no longer sustainable. He’s a seventy-two-year-old rancher with a bad back. He’s not sure how he’ll keep things going without Horace but he knows the boy must find his own way.

To become a champion Horace must change not just the way he eats, trains, and thinks, but who he is. Reinventing himself as Hector Hildago, a scrappy Mexican boxer, he heads to Tucson and begins training and entering fights. His journey brings him to boxing rings across the Southwest and Mexico and finally, to the streets of Las Vegas, where Horace learns he can’t change who he is or outrun his destiny.

A beautiful, wrenching portrait of a downtrodden man, Don’t Skip Out on Me narrates the struggle to find one's place in a vast and lonely world with profound tenderness, and will make you consider those around you—and yourself—differently.

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Writers Read: Willy Vlautin.

--Marshal Zeringue