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A strange and brilliant teenager's first panic attacks lead him down the rabbit hole in this highly anticipated debut novel from one of our most distinctive literary minds
"I steal language and ideas from Michael Clune." ―Ben Lerner, Pulitzer Prize-nominated author of The Topeka School
Nicholas is fifteen when he forgets how to breathe. It's the '90s, and he's been living with his dad in the Chicago suburbs since his Russian-born mom kicked him out. One day in geometry class, Nicholas suddenly realizes that his hands are objects. The doctor says it's just panic, but Nicholas suspects that his real problem might not be a psychiatric one: maybe the pagan god Pan is trapped inside his body. As his paradigm for his own consciousness crumbles, Nicholas, his best friend Ty, and his maybe-girlfriend Sarah hunt for answers why-in Oscar Wilde and in Baudelaire, in rock 'n roll and in Bach, and in the mysterious, drugged-out Barn, where Todd's charismatic older brother Ian leads the high schoolers in rituals that might end up breaking more than just the law.
Funny, provocative, and cerebral, Pan is a new masterpiece of the coming-of-age genre by Guggenheim fellow and literary scholar Michael W. Clune, whose memoir of heroin addiction, White Out, "one of the year's best books" (The New Yorker), earned him a cult readership. Now, in Pan, Clune drops us inside the human psyche, where we risk discovering that the forces controlling our inner lives could, in fact, be anything. "Michael Clune writes lucid, shrewd, startling prose capable of laying bare pockets of human experience that might otherwise go without words. Pan proves his mesmeric ability to return our world and selves to us made strange and changed; there is no other writer like him."
-Maggie Nelson
"A strange, vivid, and intense novel about the mystery of consciousness and the magic of childhood."
-Tao Lin
"I steal language and ideas from Michael Clune."
-Ben Lerner Michael W. Clune is the critically acclaimed author of the memoirs Gamelife and White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin. His academic books include A Defense of Judgment, Writing Against Time, and American Literature and the Free Market. Clune's work has appeared in venues ranging from Harper's, Salon, and Granta, to Behavioral and Brain Sciences, PMLA, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. His work has been recognized by fellowships and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Baker Nord Center, and others. He is currently Samuel B. and Virginia C. Knight Professor of the Humanities at Case Western Reserve University, and lives in Cleveland Heights, Ohio.
"I steal language and ideas from Michael Clune." ―Ben Lerner, Pulitzer Prize-nominated author of The Topeka School
Nicholas is fifteen when he forgets how to breathe. It's the '90s, and he's been living with his dad in the Chicago suburbs since his Russian-born mom kicked him out. One day in geometry class, Nicholas suddenly realizes that his hands are objects. The doctor says it's just panic, but Nicholas suspects that his real problem might not be a psychiatric one: maybe the pagan god Pan is trapped inside his body. As his paradigm for his own consciousness crumbles, Nicholas, his best friend Ty, and his maybe-girlfriend Sarah hunt for answers why-in Oscar Wilde and in Baudelaire, in rock 'n roll and in Bach, and in the mysterious, drugged-out Barn, where Todd's charismatic older brother Ian leads the high schoolers in rituals that might end up breaking more than just the law.
Funny, provocative, and cerebral, Pan is a new masterpiece of the coming-of-age genre by Guggenheim fellow and literary scholar Michael W. Clune, whose memoir of heroin addiction, White Out, "one of the year's best books" (The New Yorker), earned him a cult readership. Now, in Pan, Clune drops us inside the human psyche, where we risk discovering that the forces controlling our inner lives could, in fact, be anything. "Michael Clune writes lucid, shrewd, startling prose capable of laying bare pockets of human experience that might otherwise go without words. Pan proves his mesmeric ability to return our world and selves to us made strange and changed; there is no other writer like him."
-Maggie Nelson
"A strange, vivid, and intense novel about the mystery of consciousness and the magic of childhood."
-Tao Lin
"I steal language and ideas from Michael Clune."
-Ben Lerner Michael W. Clune is the critically acclaimed author of the memoirs Gamelife and White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin. His academic books include A Defense of Judgment, Writing Against Time, and American Literature and the Free Market. Clune's work has appeared in venues ranging from Harper's, Salon, and Granta, to Behavioral and Brain Sciences, PMLA, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. His work has been recognized by fellowships and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Baker Nord Center, and others. He is currently Samuel B. and Virginia C. Knight Professor of the Humanities at Case Western Reserve University, and lives in Cleveland Heights, Ohio.