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October 04, 2004
I Am Not Dante Alighieri
Oh, our mordant pith. Anyway, if any of you follow creative non-fiction as fastidiously as we do, then you'll be familiar with John Haskell, the author of last year's fucking mind-rendingly good 'I Am Not Jackson Pollock', which contained short stories set within the framework of facts, e.g. Jackson Pollock's life-ending car accident, or Glenn Gould's OCD people-phobia; basically stuff that, if it were badly done and featured more words like 'throbbing' and 'ample', would be considered really well-researched fan-fiction. 'I Am Not Jackson Pollock' was, along with Ben Marcus' 'Notable American Women', among the most elegant and precisely wrought prose we read last year, so the news that Haskell is releasing his debut novel already is enough to make us want to shave off our beard(s?) of unhappiness (long story). That's right. While strolling wistfully through the Farrar, Straus and Giroux website, as we often do on Sunday afternoons, we stumbled across a listing for 'American Purgatorio', to be released on January 4th of '05, 248 pages of pure Haskell text-fuckery. Here's FS+G's surely unbiased opinion about the book:
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.
You can pre-order 'American Purgatorio' over at L'Amazon, even though for some reason they have the book listed at 256 pages. They must be counting the dust jacket and hardcover as separate, readable pages, those crazy bastards.
Posted by matt at October 4, 2004 08:00 AM
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