Tom McCarthy

A man receives fabulous recompense for a traumatic accident, and completes his recovery with an unusual therapy program that slowly spirals out of control.

"Essays on literature, pop culture, and more from the cult novelist and critic Tom McCarthy Fifteen brilliant essays written over as many years provide a map of the sensibility and critical intelligence of Tom McCarthy, one of the most original and challenging novelists at work today. Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish explores a wide range of subjects, from the weather considered as a form of media, to the paintings of Gerhard Richter and the movies of David Lynch, to Patty Hearst as revolutionary sex goddess, to the still-radical implications of established masterpieces such as Ulysses (how do you write after it?), Tristram Shandy, and the unsung junky genius Alexander Trocchi's darkly beautiful Cain's Book. The longer "Recessional" examines the place of time in writing--how writing makes a new time of its own, a time apart from institutional time--while the startling "Nothing Will Have Taken Place" moves from Mallarme and Don DeLillo to the ball mastery of Zidane to look at how art, whether that of a poet, novelist, or athlete, destroys given codes of meaning and behavior, returning them to play. Certain points of reference recur with dreamlike insistence--among them the artist Ed Ruscha's Royal Road Test, a photographic documentation of the roadside debris of a Royal typewriter hurled from the window of a traveling car; the great blooms of jellyfish that are filling the oceans and gumming up the machinery of commerce and military domination--and the question throughout is: How can art explode the restraining conventions of so-called realism, whether aesthetic or political, to engage in the active reinvention of the world?"--

Follows a cast of dissolute Bohemians, political refugees, football referees, deaf police agents, assassins and stranded astronauts as they chase a stolen icon painting from Sofia to Prague and beyond. Set in a Central Europe rapidly fragmenting after the fall of Communism.

"When we first meet U., the narrator of SATIN ISLAND, he is sitting in the airport at Turin, caught in a delay caused by a rogue airplane. Like everyone else in the waiting area, he is sifting through airport pages on his laptop, and then through news sites, social pages, corridors of trivia...until he happens to stumble on information about an image on a famous shroud in Turin. The image itself isn't even visible on the shroud; it only emerged when some amateur photographer looked at the negative of a shot he'd taken and saw the figure--Christ's body supine after crucifixion. Only in the negative: the negative became a positive. A few decades later when the shroud was radiocarbon dated, it turned out to come from no later than the mid-thirteenth century. But that didn't trouble the believers. Things like that never do. A "corporate ethnographer," U. is tasked with writing the Great Report. Yet at every turn, U. finds himself overwhelmed by the ubiquity of data, lost in a buffer zone and wandering through a crowd of apparitions. Meanwhile, Madison, the woman he is seeing, becomes increasingly elusive, much like the particulars in the case of the recent, highly-publicized parachutist's death, with which U. is obsessed. He also develops a perverse interest in oil spills, spending great amounts of time watching loops of clean up videos. As U. begins to wonder if perhaps the Great Report will remain a shapeless, oozing plasma, his senses are reawakened by an ominous dream of an apocalyptic cityscape. SATIN ISLAND is a novel that captures the way we experience the world today, our efforts to find meaning, to stay awake, and discern the narratives we think of as our lives"--