Artificial Light

James Greer

7/2006 · Akashic Books

Táto e‑kniha

“Artificial Light beats the bejeezus out of the last dozen Thomas Pynchons, the last nineteen Don DeLillos, and the last forty-three Kurt Vonneguts.”—Richard Meltzer

“In his ambitious and intriguing debut novel, indie rock expert Greer, author of Guided by Voices, employs one of literature's oldest gambits, the book-within-a-book structure, three times over. A young librarian calling herself Fiat Lux fills a set of notebooks with her passion for books and an enigmatic account of her interlude with Kurt C, a famous indie rock star who appears unheralded in Dayton, Ohio, and buys the long-abandoned Orville Wright mansion. A member of the rock group Whiskey Ships is trying to write about his musical odyssey but longs to return to his book about Orville Wright, whose long-lost diaries also feed the narrative stream. Greer picks the lock on the Kurt Cobain mythos and the rapid commercialization of indie rock…Strong writing and shrewd perceptions prevail, backed by wry humor, compelling stumblebum characters, a true-blue louche atmosphere, and arresting insights into the dream of art, be it literature or rock and roll.”—Booklist

O autorovi

James Greer is the author of the novel Artificial Light (Akashic 2006), which won a California Book Award for Best Debut Novel, and the nonfiction book Guided By Voices: A Brief History (Grove Press 2006), a biography about a band for which he once played bass guitar. He is currently working with director Steven Soderbergh on a rock musical. Dennis Cooper is the author of 'The George Miles Cycle,' an interconnected sequence of five novels published in the US by Grove Press and translated into fourteen languages. His most recent novel is God, Jr. (Grove, 2005). He lives in Los Angeles.