Vulgar Things - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0007542534 ISBN 13: 9780007542536

Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers

Synopsis

The second novel from Lee Rourke, author of the cult hit 'The Canal'.

About this title

About the Author

LEE ROURKEis the author of the short-story collectionEveryday, the novelThe Canal(winner of theGuardian's Not The Booker Prize 2010) and the poetry collectionVarroa Destructor. He is Writer-in-Residence at Kingston University, where he is an MFA lecturer in creative writing and critical theory. He lives by the sea. Follow him on Twitter:@leerourke

Review

`Sad, lost men looking for maps in the starry Essex sky, small-town strippers, absent mothers, angry brothers, planets photographed on smart phones, cider and a lot of rare steak - Rourke is on his way to becoming the J. G. Ballard of Southend-on-Sea.' Deborah Levy `The poetry of estuary landscapes - muddy creeks, silhouettes of refineries, the slow passage of giant container ships, the flat horizon - shines through Lee Rourke's prose with a black luminescence.' Tom McCarthy `As poignant and unsettling as a beam of light hitting the night sky from across the far-off wastes.' Eimear McBride `A consistently disturbing yet compelling vision of loss, violence and identity, "Vulgar Things" stalks the reader's memory long after the last page. A novel of innovation and resonance, it is as bleak and as beautiful as a deserted coastline.' Stuart Evers `Rourke now shares a publisher with Jonathan Franzen ... Admirers may rest assured that in other respects Rourke has not sold out ... Rourke writes under the spell of "The Waste Land" ... [For T. S. Eliot] the sense that literature must embrace modern life wrestled with an equivalent urge to grip it in tweezers, nose held. You feel the same tension at work in "Vulgar Things".' Anthony Cummins, Literary Review

Edition details

• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0007542534
• ISBN 13: 9780007542536
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 242