The Boy with a Torn Hat

The Boy with a Torn Hat by Thornton Sully was a finalist in the 2010 USA Book Awards for Literary Fiction

Morgan is an impoverished American artist living abroad, who cannot fathom why his work never rises above mediocre until he learns the secret from a carnival of street mimes and buskers.  Romance, beer, and busking, and finally, the discovery of fire.

“Henry Miller meets Bob Dylan in this coming of age romp played out in the twisted alleyways and smoky beer halls of Heidelberg. in The Boy with a Torn Hat, Sully is a cunning wordsmith and master of bringing music to art and art to language. Excessive, expressive, lusty, and once in a blue metaphor—profound. Here is what I mean: ‘Some women are imprisoned like a tongue in a bell—they swing violently but unnoticed until the moment of contact with the bronze perimeter of their existence—and then the sound they make astonishes us its power and pain and beauty, and its immediacy’—Wunderbar”
-Jonathan Freedman, Pulitzer Prize winner