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A unique and very funny novel in which art imitates life and life imitates art, in the most mysterious ways
"Great art is difficult" - that's the motto of the Family Fang. What's even more difficult is being raised by great artists. Just ask Buster and Annie, who spent their childhood starring in their parents' madcap performance art pieces. After all, when your art lies in subverting normality, it can be difficult to raise a normal family. Now that Buster and Annie have grown up, the chaos of their childhood has made it a struggle to adjust to life outside the fishbowl of their parents' strange world.
But when the lives they've built come crashing down, they have nowhere left to go but home, where their parents plan for one last performance that is to be their magnum opus, whether the kids agree to participate or not. It's their most ambitious project yet, and it brings the Fangs to the difficult decision about what's ultimately more important: their family or their art.
Kevin Wilson is the author of the collection Tunneling to the Center of the Earth (Ecco/Harper Perennial, 2009), which received the 2009 Shirley Jackson Award. His fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, Tin House, One Story, Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere, and has appeared in four volumes of the New Stories from the South: The Year's Best Anthology. He has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the KHN Center for the Arts. He lives in Sewanee, Tennessee, with his wife, the poet Leigh Anne Couch, and his son, Griff, where he teaches fiction at the University of the South and helps run the Sewanee Writers Conference.
"Great art is difficult" - that's the motto of the Family Fang. What's even more difficult is being raised by great artists. Just ask Buster and Annie, who spent their childhood starring in their parents' madcap performance art pieces. After all, when your art lies in subverting normality, it can be difficult to raise a normal family. Now that Buster and Annie have grown up, the chaos of their childhood has made it a struggle to adjust to life outside the fishbowl of their parents' strange world.
But when the lives they've built come crashing down, they have nowhere left to go but home, where their parents plan for one last performance that is to be their magnum opus, whether the kids agree to participate or not. It's their most ambitious project yet, and it brings the Fangs to the difficult decision about what's ultimately more important: their family or their art.
Kevin Wilson is the author of the collection Tunneling to the Center of the Earth (Ecco/Harper Perennial, 2009), which received the 2009 Shirley Jackson Award. His fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, Tin House, One Story, Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere, and has appeared in four volumes of the New Stories from the South: The Year's Best Anthology. He has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the KHN Center for the Arts. He lives in Sewanee, Tennessee, with his wife, the poet Leigh Anne Couch, and his son, Griff, where he teaches fiction at the University of the South and helps run the Sewanee Writers Conference.