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Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir Paperback – Illustrated, September 17, 2005

by Nick Flynn (Author)
4.2 4.2 out of 5 stars 473 ratings
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"Clear-eyed, inventive, and astonishingly honest." ―Elissa Schappel, Vanity Fair

Nick Flynn met his father when he was working as a caseworker in a homeless shelter in Boston. As a teenager he'd received letters from this stranger father, a self-proclaimed poet and con man doing time in federal prison for bank robbery. Another Bullshit Night in Suck City tells the story of the trajectory that led Nick and his father onto the streets, into that shelter, and finally to each other.

Previous page
  1. Print length
    376 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    W. W. Norton
  4. Publication date
    September 17, 2005
  5. Dimensions
    5.6 x 1.1 x 8.2 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    0393329402
  7. ISBN-13
    978-0393329407
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Flynn has written a potent, distinctive autobiography.... Flynn's talents are considerable―he has a compelling voice and wry sense of humor, especially about himself."
― Vendela Vida, New York Times Book Review

"The prose swirls in graceful arcs that frequently rise to the level of poetry, leavened by mordant humor.... It's a powerful tale, stylishly told."
― Michael Mewshaw, Washington Post

"In a perverse act of divine intervention, a life worth writing about was bestowed on a man actually able to write―in startling, beautiful, unsentimental prose.... It is crammed with beauty and wisdom, and everyone will love it."
― Devin Friedman, GQ

"A remarkable feat: a clear-eyed, inventive, and astonishingly honest guided tour of hell."
― Elissa Schappel, Vanity Fair

"Flynn's authentic voice... holds us rapt, keeping both the tragic and the redemptive possibilities open."
― Darren Reidy, Village Voice

"Told with energy, critical reflection and sensitivity, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City is less a memoir than a study of one of America's darker conundrums: homelessness."
― Thomas Curwen, Los Angeles Times Book Review

"[Flynn's] story is eerie testimony to the potent influence of an absent parent. But Nick, a poet, is too subtle a writer to say so outright, and instead lets us draw our own conclusions with a delicate, poetic logic."
― Kate Bolick, Boston Globe

"Unlike the pity parties that too many memoirs have become, Night has no maudlin gestures, no 'inspirational' tones, no hysterics; it stares down emptiness with clear, dry eyes."
― Troy Patterson, Entertainment Weekly

About the Author

Nick Flynn is the author of This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire and three previous memoirs, including the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award–winning Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, and four volumes of poetry. A professor on the creative writing faculty at the University of Houston, he lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ W. W. Norton; Reprint edition (September 17, 2005)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 376 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0393329402
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0393329407
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 12 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.6 x 1.1 x 8.2 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.2 4.2 out of 5 stars 473 ratings

About the author

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Nick Flynn

Nick Flynn

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Nick Flynn is the award-winning author of Some Ether, Blind Huber, The Ticking is the Bomb and Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, winner of the PEN/Martha Albrand Award. He divides his time between Texas, where he teaches at the University of Houston, and Brooklyn, New York.

Customer reviews

4.2 out of 5 stars
4.2 out of 5
473 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Anne G.
5.0 out of 5 stars Like nothing you've ever read before
Reviewed in the United States on December 10, 2012
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A powerful, absorbing, moving memoir, unlike any I've read before (and I've read a lot of autobiographies and memoirs -- it does remind me a bit of Peter Reich's "A Book of Dreams," also a son's story of his elusive, possibly mad father). Full of short, sharp vignettes and beautifully structured, the book tells of author Nick Flynn's creative, delusional, criminal, alcoholic father and of Nick's own struggles with addiction, abandonment, and loss. If it were a novel, the story would seem almost contrived -- for example, not knowing his father when he was young, Flynn encounters him as an adult when he's working at a homeless shelter where his father is a client; or Flynn finding out that his college girlfriend is the daughter of his father's loyal friends who have taken him in over and over again, over the years. Flynn is a poet and his writing reflects that -- mostly straightforward, but laced with imagery and passages that are wonderful to read, sometimes abstract, and often heartbreaking. Flynn's father fancied himself a writer, and one of the great themes of the book is Flynn both resisting and fulfilling his father's legacies as a writer and an addict -- he is brutally, and not always flatteringly, honest about his own travails, and the result is a deeply compelling book.
10 people found this helpful
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Allen Rosen
4.0 out of 5 stars A Good Story, Well Told
Reviewed in the United States on March 23, 2013
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This is the first book I have read by Nick Flynn and I am happy to report that is was a pleasure to read. Flynn's prose is fluid, plain-spoken, unadorned. He doesn't clutter his sentences with useless adjectives; nor does he seek out dramatic flourishes. Just good,old-fashioned story telling -- exactly what I like in a writer.

Above all, Flynn's story rings true in nearly every sentence. He doesn't make himself into a hero; nor does he abase himself. He tells a story that is not unfamiliar to many of us -- a coming of age story set in a period when illegal drugs, both hard and soft, were plentiful, fashionable and cheap; of an alcoholic, suicidal mother who could not cope with the challenges of this world; of a father whose life was a massive failure; of years feeling lost in the wilderness, with no clear ambition, no sense of direction.

Many of us have been there. Most survived. Some thrived, though not all. Flynn is one who did, and who turned the journey into a compelling memoir.
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D. P. Birkett
5.0 out of 5 stars La vie boheme
Reviewed in the United States on September 28, 2004
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Nick Flynn's alcoholic, narcissistic, and unemployable father had pretensions to being a writer, deserted his family, and became a homeless derelict. Nick's life sometimes seems to be taking a similar course and he watches the old man's decay with a mixture of compassion and repulsion. Nick takes a job dealing with the homeless and his father becomes one of his clients. His brother refuses any contact with the father. His mother kills herself.
The writing is wonderful. The style is minimalist. In spite of the tragic events that are described a sharp sense of humor gleams through.
It's thought-provoking in many ways and on many levels. I was especially intrigued by the way it casts a look that is sometimes cynical and despairing at our well-meaning efforts to help the homeless. I'd recently read Christopher Jenck's "The Homeless" and Isaac and Armat's "Madness in the Streets" but this gave me insights of a different kind.
Incidentally, why on earth couldn't the New York Times bring itself to print the whole title? I can understand that the synonym for feces may be a taboo word but the rest is only obscene by remote association. Amazon has no qualms.
11 people found this helpful
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M.A. De Neve
3.0 out of 5 stars HOMELESS MEN, FATHERS AND SONS IN LIMBO
Reviewed in the United States on January 5, 2018
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Who are the drunks, the drug addicts, the crazy men who sleep on park benches, and urinate on city streets? They are someone’s sons, someone’s fathers. This is a book about homeless men written by a son.
Both Nick Flynn and his father Jonathan were late bloomers. Jonathan was a never-do-well who claimed to be a writer, but spent little time writing anything except the letters he wrote to Nick. When Jonathan took a job as a house painter, he used the credit card meant for paint and supplies to buy bourbon and new clothes. That was just one of his many cons. Jonathan ended up in prison for cashing bad checks, and then he slept in a friend’s basement for awhile. Soon he was living on the streets.
After a succession of dead-end jobs, Nick ends up as a counselor at a shelter for homeless men. Jonathan is one of the boarders. Jonathan mostly lives on the streets because he causes so much trouble, the shelter has no choice, but to ban him for a night, a week, a month or more.
The story itself is fascinating. But the text is sometimes hard to follow.
The prose is often poetry disguised as prose. It’s a hodge-podge of situations mostly relating to Jonathan. Nick writes about Ham in the Bible punished for seeing his father naked and drunk; he writes about leaving a sandwich on a park bench beside his sleeping father. He ask if this constitutes a family meal.
If I wanted a book of poetry, I could have purchased one. Too many beautiful phrases strung together often end up meaningless.
Sometimes the story meanders and becomes something else. What’s with the dialog between the five Santas and the three daughters? Was that an inserted short story?
Sometimes the text is raw exposition with no beauty. The story moves, but the writer forgot to make it interesting. This is juxtaposed with the poetic.
I try to avoid pointing out poor grammar or making it part of a review. There are many other factors that go into both good and poor books. Usually reviewers who write about a book’s poor grammar don’t know enough about grammar to be more specific. They might not know about different style books, but I was an English teacher for many years. I make mistakes too. That’s one reason I avoid the “poor grammar” comment, but…
This author does not enclose appositives or introductory phrases in commas. He often puts quotes in italics instead of between quotation marks. The paragraphs are what Robert Newton Peck calls “prison walls.” They are too long, and they have no design reason. One paragraph might have three main points; another paragraph is a ranting with no main point. Some sentences made zero sense. There are run-on sentences. Present tense and past tense are mixed up sometimes in the same sentence.
There are times when a poet or a prose writer might intentionally use poor grammar. In this book, the prose rambles like a homeless person, not sure where to go next. Commas do house phrases, clauses and appositives, so omitting them might be way to emphasize homelessness. But Im making excuses.
The author needed an editor. He should have been a better proofreader himself.
Yet he gets high scores for honesty. Nick himself spent years in questionable activities. He worked for people whom he describes as a mafia, but maybe not the Mafia. When a former tailor gives the homeless shelter racks of quality clothing from the 1950’s, he brings them home, and he and his friends dress in style. Homeless men don’t need furs or evening gowns or tuxedoes. But those items could have been sold for cash. The author doesn’t say if they ever made it to the shelter.
It’s a good story, but the execution needs ample revision.
8 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

Barbara Scott
2.0 out of 5 stars Not for me ...
Reviewed in Canada on February 9, 2021
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I could not finish reading this. I seldom quit halfway but this was jusy plain depressing. I was unable to connect with anyone ... including the narrator/writer.
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Padraig O Tuama
5.0 out of 5 stars Extraordinary. In form and content.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 21, 2018
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Extraordinary. In form and content. This is a memoir, a witness, a triumph of life, a survival, and a litany of obituaries, some of them even for the living.
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James R.
4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Prose is the Driving Element of this Memoir
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 1, 2012
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I really did enjoy this memoir, Flynn's writing is, for the most part, well paced and evocative. However, it is not a novel and is almost totally lacking in structure or drive as throughout the bulk of the book Flynn is not actively interested in his father (or his own life) and is merely drifting from one place to the next. It is a testimony to the quality of Flynn's prose that he managed to make this a compelling read.

However, there is a general numbness to the tone of the book and its pace dips quite severely at around section 5 as it takes on a slightly inventorial nature. Here we get a lot of stuff that feels like padding, fictional scenes with Flynn's dad as Santa and a few conversations presented in play format that didn't work for me at all. I think Flynn has put them there to inject some life into the drabness that eclipses this section of the memoir; yet they served to slow it down even further.

Nonetheless, this is a case in which perseverance paid off as the final section of the book regains the energy that is integral to the rest of the book and we are left with a clear picture of just how muddy and complicated the relationship between father and son can be. Sometimes beautiful, often ugly and unpleasant but a brilliant read.
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thomas
5.0 out of 5 stars Interesting night in suck city
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 8, 2016
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A magnificent all-true story in the big city. The time,
were his father strugle to survive in the streets,
are momentus if not hillarius! Worth to read.
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Lollybidhurley
5.0 out of 5 stars Good site
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 3, 2018
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Prompt delivery as stated. Would use again
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