A short life of the author
Wells Tower (b. 1973) was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, and grew up in the American South — North Carolina and Florida. He studied at Wesleyan University and holds an MFA from Columbia University. He has lived in North Carolina and has worked as a journalist for GQ, The Washington Post Magazine, Harper’s, and The New York Times Magazine.
Life and Career
Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned (2009) — nine stories published across a decade in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, and other venues before being collected — was immediately recognised as a major debut, compared to Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son, Tobias Wolff’s In the Garden of the North American Martyrs, and George Saunders’s CivilWarLand in Bad Decline. The collection was a finalist for the Story Prize.
The stories range wildly in setting and register: the title story follows a group of reluctant Viking raiders — addressed in casual contemporary idiom (“We went to Lindisfarne because it was sitting there and we knew no one was going to stop us”) — who plunder a monastery and then return home to domestic bickering. “Retreat” puts two estranged brothers in a remote mountain cabin where a dying moose becomes the fulcrum of their rivalry. “The Brown Coast” follows a failed man living in a coastal shack who finds a dead ray on the beach and begins a grim relationship with a local woman. “Wild America” traces a summer afternoon between two teenage friends that turns violent.
Tower’s journalism is also notable: his long-form pieces for GQ and The Washington Post Magazine — on subjects ranging from Christian rock festivals to Cuban nightlife — display the same physical attentiveness and dark wit as his fiction.
Themes and Style
Tower writes about men — usually unhappy, often violent, frequently bewildered by their own impulses — in landscapes that are physically specific and metaphorically loaded. Florida swamps, mountain cabins, medieval coastlines: the environments are always alive, always pressing on the characters. His prose is dense with sensory detail — the smell of rotting fish, the texture of ice, the weight of an axe — and his stories build toward moments of violence or revelation that feel both surprising and inevitable.
The Viking story’s enduring popularity rests on its tonal innovation: the translation of Norse violence into the rhythms of contemporary male complaint (“I said to Harald, ‘There is no way we’re going to Lindisfarne. Not again’”) makes the ancient and the domestic indistinguishable — which is, of course, the point.
Critical Standing
Tower is one of the most respected short story writers of his generation, frequently mentioned alongside George Saunders, Karen Russell, and Jhumpa Lahiri. The question is whether he will publish a novel or a second collection: the long silence since Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned mirrors a pattern among certain story writers (Amy Hempel, Deborah Eisenberg early in her career) who resist the pressure to produce novels.
Key Works
- Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned (2009)
What are the best stories in Everything Ravaged Everything Burned?
The most acclaimed stories are “Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned” (Viking raiders in contemporary idiom), “Retreat” (two brothers and a dying moose), “The Brown Coast” (a failed man on the Florida coast), and “Wild America” (teenage violence on a summer afternoon). Each demonstrates Tower’s combination of physical precision, dark humour, and psychological acuity.
Collecting Tower
Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned (2009, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York) first editions bring $20–$50 in fine condition. Signed copies are uncommon and bring $40–$100. The book’s growing reputation and Tower’s limited output suggest long-term collectability.