Books by Adam Thirlwell
Politics: A Novel
Moshe -- young, half-Jewish, hyper -- loves Nana. But love can be difficult. It is especially difficult if you both want to be kind to someone else. And Moshe and Nana want to be kind to Anjali -- a second-generation Indian actress with an ambiguous sex life.
Politics explores crucial domestic problems of sexual etiquette. What should the sleeping arrangements be in a ménage à trois? Is it polite to read while two people have sex beside you? Is it permissible to be jealous?
Politics is a comedy about kindness. It is also a love story. It is a love story with digressions.
It considers Milan Kundera, blow jobs, Chairman Mao's personal hygiene, Bollywood, Václav Havel, shopping, Hitler's sexual fetishes, selfishness, Osip Mandelstam, premature ejaculation, the late Queen Mother, thrush, Stalin on the phone, politeness, pink fluffy handcuffs, and Antonio Gramsci's theory of hegemony.
Politics is not about politics.
Tender, shocking, and playful, Politics is the most original fiction debut this year.
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Politics: A Novel
Politics is about: a) a threesome; b) politics
Moshe loves Nana. But love can be difficult -- especially if you want to be kind. And Moshe and Nana want to be kind to someone else.
They want to be kind to their best friend, Anjali.
Politics explores crucial problems of sexual etiquette. What should the sleeping arrangements be in a ménage-à-trois? Is it polite to read while two people have sex beside you? Is it permissible to be jealous?
Copies
No copies available.
McSweeney's Issue 42
by Dave Eggers, Adam Thirlwell
With the help of guest editor Adam Thirlwell (author of Kapow!,Visual Editions), Issue 42 is a monumental experiment in translated literaturetwelve stories taken through six translators apiece, weaving into English and then back out again, gaining new twists and textures each time, just as you'd expect a Kierkegaard story brought into English by Clancy Martin and then sent into Dutch by Cees Nooteboom before being made into English again by J. M. Coetzee to do. With original texts by Kafka and Kharms and Kenji Miyazawa, and translations by Lydia Davis and David Mitchell and Zadie Smith (along with others by John Banville and Tom McCarthy and Javier Marías, and even more by Shteyngart and Eugenides and A. S. Byatt), this will be an issue unlike anything you've seen beforealtered, echoing narratives in the hands of the finest writers of our time, brought to you in a book that looks like nothing else we’ve ever done.
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Lurid & Cute: A Novel
“The narrator of [Lurid & Cute] may be Thirlwell’s best creation yet.”―Andrew Ervin, The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice)
“Lurid & Cute is a simple story of mayhem and ennui, almost a caper, but told with such satisfying ironies and verbal dexterity that everything is Technicolor again. So alive, so inventive, so very good.”―Joshua Ferris
Lurid & Cute takes place in the suburbs of a giant city, where our narrator lives at home with his parents, together with his wife and dog. He has had a good education and, until recently, a good job. But then the lurid overtakes him―and whether this transformation is caused by our hero’s present unemployment, or his feelings for a girl who is not his wife, or the return of his old friend Hiro, it’s hard to say. What’s definite is that it sets off a chain of events that feels, to those inside it, narcotic and neurotic, like one long and terrible descent―complete with lies, deceit, and chicanery: one orgy, one brothel, and a series of firearms disputes.
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Lurid & Cute: A Novel
A dreamy and adrenaline-fueled new novel from a two-time Granta Best Young Novelist
Lurid & Cute is a kind of machine for the reader's corruption. It opens with all the things we've come to expect of Adam Thirlwell--"the playfulness of language, the way the mandarin wit, line by line, consorts with grisly or louche material," as Jeffrey Eugenides has said--when the narrator wakes confused in a seedy hotel room. He has had the good education, and also the good job. Together with his wife and dog, he lives at home with his parents. But then the lurid overtakes him--a chain of events that feels to those inside it narcotic and neurotic, like one long and terrible descent: complete with lies, deceit, and chicanery, and including, in escalating order, one orgy, one brothel, and a series of firearms disputes.
Lurid & Cute balances the complexity of an interior world--our hero's apparently innocent obsessions with food, old movies, and all the gaudy, shoddy building blocks of pop culture--with a picaresque plot delivered with expert, insidious pacing. For very possibly this is the story of a woebegone and global generation. And our hero, the sweetest narrator in world literature, also may well be the most fearsome.
It's the most sophisticated and gruesome novel from an author celebrated for his precocious talents, and it will leave you feeling like you've been on one hell of a bender.
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Kapow!
Unfolding, turning and spinning, Kapow! is a new book by best-selling British writer Adam Thirlwell.
Kapow! takes place in the thick of the Arab Spring, guided by the highspeed monologue of an unnamed narrator over-doped, over-caffeinated, over-weight trying to make sense of this history in real time: with 24 hour broadcasts, YouTube films, lesbian bars in London’s East End and far too many newspaper clippings. A clever, funny and bitingly critical cultural commentary, using spinning digressions to tell the stories of a group of interconnected characters in London and Egypt, each transformed by the idea of revolution.
Beautifully and thoughtfully designed by Studio Frith, hailed by the New York Times as the go-to graphic designer”, Kapow! asks readers to open and unfold pages, to follow text leaking in and out of paragraphs, to discover more and more visual surprises, while progressively becoming part of and lost within the narrator’s giddy digressions.
Kapow! is a beautifully crafted object told in Thirlwell’s uniquely acrobatic voice: a visually immersive storytelling experience like no other.
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The Delighted States: A Book of Novels, Romances, & Their Unknown Translators, Containing Ten Languages, Set on Four Continents, & Accompanied by ... Illustrations, & a Variety of Helpful Indexes
Having slept with a prostitute in Egypt, Gustave Flaubert begins his first novel, Madame Bovary, which influences the minor French novelist Édouard Dujardin, whose novel is read by James Joyce, whose own novel Ulysses will move the Italian novelist Italo Sveno, and later Gertrude Stein, in radical ways. This carousel of influence shows how we devour novels in translation, while often believing that style does not translate. But the history of the novel is the history of style. The Delighted States attempts to solve this conundrum while mapping an imaginary country, a country of readers: The Delighted States. As a companion, this book comes with a new translation into English of Vladimir Nabokov's "Mademoiselle O."
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