Unstrung Harp, Or, Mr Earbrass Writes a Novel - Hardcover

Gorey, Edward

4.21

1,679 ratings by Goodreads

9780747550341: Unstrung Harp, Or, Mr Earbrass Writes a Novel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0747550344 ISBN 13: 9780747550341

Publisher: Bloomsbury Pub Ltd, 2000

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Perhaps one of his most autobiographical works, "The Unstrung Harp" is a look at the literary life and its 'attendant woes: isolation, writer's block, professional jealousy, and plain boredom.' But as with all of Edward Gorey's books, "TUH" is also about life in general, with its anguish, turnips, conjunctions, illness, defeat, string, parties, no parties, desuetude, fever, tides, labels, mourning, elsewards. Finally, "TUH" is about Edward Gorey the writer, about Edward Gorey writing "The Unstrung Harp". Originally published in 1953, it's a small masterpiece.

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About the Author:

Edward Gorey is one of the most renowned cartoonists of our time. His distinctive and unsettling work has appeared on many New Yorker covers, and in almost a hundred successful books of his own. He has also illustrated books by John Updike, T.S. Eliot, Edward Lear and Samuel Beckett. 'The dark, appallingly funny works of Edward Gorey are finally being published in Britain. Not before time. A writer and artist of genius.' Independent on Sunday 'Malevolent and brilliant.' Big Issue

From Kirkus Reviews:

The clichs of English country-house fiction and the more generic ``unspeakable horror of the literary life'' are memorably skewered in this urbane jeu first published in 1953 (and, scandalously, out of print ever since). Its protagonist, Mr. Earbrass, is a reclusive well-to-do bachelor author of middle years, with a profile (as seen in Gorey's serenely sinister accompanying drawings) rather resembling a benign croquet mallet and a neurasthenic sensibility hilariously vulnerable to every harrowing stage in the process of conceiving, completing, and publicizing his new novel. He himself, we're surely to infer, is the unstrung harpand the deadpan tale of his inharmonious relations with the dangerous world of letters is both a caution to would-be writers and (to use a word utterly inappropriate to Mr. Earbrass's strangled gentility) a hoot. -- Copyright �1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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