Shadow-Box - Hardcover

Logue, Antonia

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0771053517 ISBN 13: 9780771053511

Publisher: McClelland & Stewart, 1999

Synopsis

Antonia Logue’s riveting first novel weaves together the lives of three extraordinary characters from the early half of the twentieth century: Jack Johnson, who became the first black Heavyweight Champion of the World; Arthur Cravan, semi-professional boxer, art critic, and nephew of Oscar Wilde; and the beautiful Modernist poet Mina Loy, Cravan’s wife and the third figure in this charismatic triangle. What unfolds is a compulsively readable tale of ambition and betrayal, hatred and injustice, vanity and triumph, ranging across the United States and Europe – from the salons of Paris and a bull-fight arena in Spain to elegant Manhattan and Sing-Sing Prison – during the heady period between the two World Wars. Daring, forceful, passionate, and sharply observed, Shadow-Box is a brilliant melding of history and imagination.

About this title

About the Author

Antonia Logue was born in Park, County Derry in 1972, and brought up in Brussels. She received her degree in English literature at Trinity College, Dublin, in 1995. From 1990 she worked as a freelance journalist, for newspapers including The Irish Times, The Guardian, and The Times. Shadow-Box is her first novel, and the winner of the Irish Times Literature Prize for Fiction. She was recently named by the Observer one of the twenty-one writers for the twenty-first century.

Antonia Logue currently lives in Dublin, where she writes full-time.

From the Back Cover

“Every once in a while an astounding new talent makes its presence felt on the literary stage. Antonia Logue is undoubtedly one of these talents.”
–Toronto Star

“A fearless excursion into the nature of passion, through the blood-sports of boxing, poetry, and art.…A work of astonishing acuity.”
–Merilyn Simonds

“Shadow-Box achieves the delicate alchemical reaction by which brute reality is converted into glittering, fictional gold.”
–The Times (U.K.)

“An exuberant, audacious debut…”
–Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“She floors the reader in the first seconds and lets you get up only to dazzle you with dancing and floating, feinting and impeccable combinations.”
–Globe and Mail

“Immediately engrossing.…Its impact, like the best poetry or a powerful left hook, is visceral, intense, and enduring.”
–Time Out New York

“Logue’s sentences fulminate with vigour and assurance. . . . [She] has a fluid, wide-ranging pen and creates hard-assed fight scenes as easily as languid recall of lovers’ first meetings.”
–The Observer (U.K.)

“This is a furious novel about fighters and poets, fists and decadence, art and rage.…The humming, floating, stinging energy of her Jack Johnson pages suggest that Logue is a natural writer.…Logue knows how to carve a sentence packed with gusto. . . .”
–Montreal Gazette

“Ambitious and wide-ranging.…An enjoyable and entertaining novel.…”
–Times Literary Supplement

“Imaginatively conceived and elegantly executed.”
–Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Remarkable.…”
–Booklist (starred review)

“Logue’s writing is boldly descriptive and strikingly true.…With Shadow-Box Antonia Logue has given us a story that is exciting, significant, and beautifully told.”
–Uptown Magazine

“A mesmerizing, beautifully written story…”
–Sunday Independent (U.K.)

“…Outstanding.…Any writer who can blend boxing and undying love, Dadaism and racism, mad desire and maddening loneliness to such remarkable effect is certainly one to watch.”
–Scotland on Sunday

“Ambitious…[Antonia Logue] has raised some interesting questions about the balance between great art and life, and the price always mercilessly extracted.”
-The Irish Times

Edition details

• Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0771053517
• ISBN 13: 9780771053511
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320