A Disorder Peculiar to the Country: A Novel - Couverture rigide

Kalfus, Ken

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0060501405 ISBN 13 : 9780060501402

Editeur : Ecco, 2006

Synopsis

Book by Kalfus Ken

A propos du livre

Présentation de l'éditeur :

In a rollicking black comedy about terrorism, war, and conjugal strife, the author whom Salon calls "a writer of chameleonic fluency" revisits some peculiar episodes in current American history.

Joyce and Marshall Harriman are struggling to divorce each other while sharing a cramped, hateful Brooklyn apartment with their two small children. One late-summer morning, Joyce departs for Newark Airport to catch a flight to San Francisco, and Marshall goes to his office in the World Trade Center. She misses her flight, and he's late for work, but on that grim day, in a devastated city, among millions seized by fear and grief, each thinks the other's dead and each is secretly, shamefully, gloriously happy.

Opening with a swift kick to our national piety, A Disorder Peculiar to the Country follows Joyce and Marshall as they swallow their mutual disappointment, their divorce conflict intensifies, and they suffer, in unexpectedly personal ways, the many strange ravages that beset America in the first years of the Bush administration. Joyce suspects Marshall has sent an anthrax-laced envelope to her office. Marshall taps her phone and studies plans for constructing a suicide bomb. The stock market crash and the war in Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib and the clash of civilizations: all become marital battlefields. Concluding with the liberation of Iraq, A Disorder Peculiar to the Country astonishingly lampoons how our nation's public calamities have encroached upon our most intimate private terrors. It firmly establishes Ken Kalfus as one of the most daring and inventive writers at work today.

Quatrième de couverture :

In the middle of a protracted New York divorce, Joyce and Marshall each think the other is killed on September 11 - and they're covertly delighted, until they return home safely to their hotly contested apartment. As their bitter marital conflict is further complicated by anthrax scares, suicide bombs, stock market crashes, FBI ineptitude and foreign wars, they suffer, in ways unexpectedly personal and increasingly ludicrous, the many strange ravages of our time. In this astonishing black comedy, Ken Kalfus suggests how America's public calamities have encroached upon its most private illusions.
'A blistering portrait of a New York couple going through a divorce in the aftermath of the attacks on September 11, 2001 . . . a staggeringly controlled and moving piece of prose' Sunday Telegraph
'The most original to be written about America's moral climate in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks...Kalfus is the first to take on the clichéd idea that the terrorists really did inaugurate a new order and that the world, or at least our minds, changed the morning after' Times Literary Supplement
'If anyone is in any doubt that America is producing phenomenally experimental literature, then they need only look to Ken Kalfus . . . Where most writers would shy away, Kalfus rubs your nose in it as he tickles your ear. A Disorder Peculiar to the Country is a bold, provocative and ultimately sensitive novel' Scotland on Sunday
'An edgy story of contemporary divorce, reading as if Douglas Coupland had turned into a novelisation of Kramer v Kramer' Mark Lawson, Guardian
'Utterly enthralling' Financial Times

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Ecco
• Date d'édition: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0060501405
• ISBN 13: 9780060501402
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 256