Philip Beard
Philip Beard is a recovering attorney and award-winning author of Dear Zoe, which was a Book Sense Pick, a Borders Original Voices selection, and was named by the American Library Association's "Booklist" as one of its Ten Best First Novels of the year. It has enjoyed a second life being taught in high school classrooms across the country and is currently being developed as a feature film. His latest novel, Swing, centered around an unlikely friendship between a 10 year-old boy and a legless Korean War veteran, recently received the 2016 IPPY Gold Medal for Contemporary Fiction.
Praise for Swing:
"Philip Beard's SWING is a novel to be savored"
- Sara Gruen, New York Times Bestselling author of Water for Elephants
“…at once heartbreaking, uplifting and emotionally resonant. In a word, it’s beautiful."
-Pittsburgh Magazine
"SWING is richly rewarding...a tight, poignant coming of age novel...[that] will stay with you long after you put this book down."
–Sports Illustrated
“It wouldn’t be fair or accurate to call SWING a sports book. It’s too rare for that.”
–The Sporting News
“Every character—the absent father, the troubled sister, the mysterious wonder that is John Kostka—feels alive due to Beard‘s skillfully simple prose and dialogue. With SWING, Beard has hit it out of the park.”
–Foreword Reviews
“...just about perfect.”
-The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Praise for Dear Zoe,
“Like The Lovely Bones, it is a piercing look at how a family recovers from a devastating loss. Everything about this moving, powerful debut rings true.”
– Booklist (starred review)
“Dear Zoe is an almost flawless novel of self-discovery and redemption. It is the sort of book that a generation can call ‘theirs,’ a book that captures the trials of adolescence and the aching numbness of America in the aftermath of 9/11.”
– The Press of Atlantic City
“The whole novel rings with truth. By the end of it, we’re meditating on the ideas of loss and redemption, the ways in which personal tragedies get absorbed into larger ones, but never
obliterated, never forgotten.”
– The Buffalo News
“People who fall in love can fall out of it.”
“But love is this really powerful thing that everyone's got if they'd just learn how to accept it. I mean, come on. If it's something we all have to give, and if it's something we all want, doesn't that mean there's exactly enough to go around?”
“Remember how I said nothing changes everything? I think I was wrong about that. I'm starting to think that maybe everything changes everything. That we never know what's going to happen next and we're not even supposed to. Maybe 'Z' is the shape of everyone's life. You're going along in what feels like a straight line, headed for one horizon, the only one as far as you know, and then something happens, maybe something good, maybe something terrible, or maybe just something like seeing a guy picking out a cantelope at the store, something that feels like nothing, and all of a sudden you're headed at another horizon altogether. Good things can happen that you did nothing to deserve. Bad things can happen that aren't anyone's fault. And it's sad how, if you let yourself, it's so much easier to think about what you've lost instead of what you have left. I'm not saying everything's okay, because it's not. We will never, ever be the same without you. We have our good days and bad days as a family, and you will always be the invisible center of both. But love is this really powerful thing that everyone's got if they'd just learn how to accept it. I mean, come on. If it's something we all have to give, and it's something we all want, doesn't that mean there's exactly enough to go around?”
“That on any day you could pick there are thousands and thousands of little deaths, tiny tragedies, and that all of them matter.”