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  3. American Purgatorio

EBOOK

American Purgatorio

A Novel

John Haskell
1
(2)
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Pages
248
Year
2013
Language
English
Publisher
Farrar, Straus and Giroux

About

A mesmerizing first novel about a man, a woman, and a disappearance.

"I'm from Chicago originally. I went to New York, married a girl named Anne, and was in the middle of living happily ever after when something happened."

So begins John Haskell's mesmerizing first novel, American Purgatorio, the story of a happily married man who discovers, as he walks out of a convenience store, that his life has suddenly vanished. In cool, precise prose, written as both a detective story and a meditation on the seven deadly sins, Haskell tells a story that is by turns tragic and comic, compassionate and gripping. From the brownstones of New York City to the sandy beaches of Southern California, American Purgatorio follows the journey of a man whose object of desire is both heartbreaking and ephemeral. It confirms John Haskell's reputation as one of our most intriguing new writers, "one of those rare authors who makes language seem limitless in its possibilities" (Susan Reynolds, Los Angeles Times).

Related Subjects

  • Literary
  • Adult Fiction

Reviews

"I liked John Haskell's American Purgatorio--that is to say, I liked its tone--from the first page; by page twenty I was completely in love with it and shortly after that I began to think that it might turn out to be a great book. At the same time, since it was so weird, such a high-wire act, I worried, briefly, that Haskell might blow it in some way. Such worries proved short-lived: American Purgatorio gets better and better. It is wildly original, wonderful, amazing, tender, heart-breaking. It's also--and this is remarkable in a book that is so funny--extremely wise. I was going to say your life will be improved by reading it but I think that gets things the wrong way round; your life will be impoverished if you don't."
Geoff Dyer, author of Out of Sheer Rage
"In these wholly unique meditations on what it is to be human...Haskell makes the familiar his own--playing with language and history, turning time inside out, he delivers our culture back to us--made entirely new."
A.M. Holmes with praise for I Am Not Jackson Pollock
"John Haskell's I am Not Jackson Pollock is a wonderfully intelligent, audacious and perverse collection of . . . what exactly? Fiction? Gossip? Film studies? Iconograph? Liberty taking? Here's a book that defies the usual categories -- but one thing's for sure, I savored every mythic, mesmerizing word of it."
Jim Crace with praise for I Am Not Jackson Pollock

Artists

John HaskellAuthor