Дональд Антрим — новинки

Огромная полуразрушенная библиотека семейного особняка, из окон которой видны костры, разведенные бездомными в заброшенной долине. Хаос одной ночи, в котором братья пытаются найти урну с прахом отца, соперничают между собой, предаются гедонизму и философским разговорам. Но ближе к рассвету становится ясно, что у каждого из них есть зловещая цель, и главный герой Даг — в центре надвигающейся катастрофы.

Nothing is simple for the men and women in Donald Antrim's stories. As they do the things we all do—bum a cigarette at a party, stroll with a girlfriend down Madison Avenue, take a kid to the zoo—they're confronted with their own uncooperative selves. These artists, writers, lawyers, teachers, and actors make fools of themselves, spiral out of control, have delusions of grandeur, despair, and find it hard to imagine a future. They talk, they listen, they hope, they dream. They look for communion in a city, both beautiful and menacing, which can promise so much and yield so little. But they are hungry for life. They want to love and be loved.
These stories, all published in The New Yorker over the last fifteen years, make it clear that Antrim is one of America's most important writers. His work has been praised by his significant contemporaries, including Jonathan Franzen, Thomas Pynchon, Jeffrey Eugenides, and George Saunders, who described The Verificationist as "one of the most pleasure-giving, funny, perverse, complicated, addictive novels of the last twenty years." And here is Antrim's best book yet: the story collection that reveals him as a master of the form.

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice

In the winter of 2000, shortly after his mother's death, Donald Antrim began writing about his family. In pieces that appeared in The New Yorker and were anthologized in Best American Essays, Antrim explored his intense and complicated relationships with his mother, Louanne, an artist, teacher, and ferociously destabilizing alcoholic; his gentle grandfather, who lived in the mountains of North Carolina and who always hoped to save his daughter from herself; and his father, who married his mother twice.

The Afterlife is an elliptical, sometimes tender, sometimes blackly hilarious portrait of a family--faulty, cracked, enraging--and of a man struggling to learn the nature of his origins.

In his award-winning second collection, David Means explores the fragility of those things that we cherish most. His incomparable, distinct voice--often wildly humorous, always engaging--has led the New York Times to call Means "one of our most talented younger writers."

Donald Antrim's The Verificationist is a deadly serious, desperately playful, off-the-wall, and perfectly on-target book permeated by the unlikely smell of maple syrup in the evening and the sharpened consciousness of a group of psychoanalysts.

Tom is our narrator -- a seemingly adequately analyzed psychotherapist who, during a nightlong pancake dinner with colleagues, finds himself locked in an embrace with Bernhardt, the towering father figure of the group. Bernhardt is merely trying to keep Tom from starting a food fight, but the effects are disastrous: in an out-of-body experience, Tom floats up to the ceiling and from there looks down on himself and his cronies. Over the course of the night, he watches as his friendships, his marriage, even his professional identity, unfold and unravel until, in a catastrophic and inevitable tandem ascent and regression, he loses his very sense of himself as a man.

Doug and 98 of his 99 brothers (George has run off with embezzled funds and a girl named Jane) gather in the huge family library for dinner, drinking, and some late-night football. Throughout the evening, the chaos grows into a complex web of conflicting memories, hurt feelings, rivalries, alliances, and shared awareness.

Announcing a bold new American voice laced with pitch black humor and as taut as a victim on a rack, this spectacularly provocative debut novel is graceful, electric, a wickedly funny tale of a world made riotous by life's mysterious and sometimes violent accidents. A Harper'sserial.