The Immensity of The Here and Now - Hardcover

West, Paul

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0966599853 ISBN 13: 9780966599855

Publisher: Voyant Publishing, 2003

Synopsis

Fiction. "In Paul West's 23rd book of fiction, The Immensity of the Here and Now, the aftereffects of [9.11] gradually come into view, then withdraw into a jungle of memory and hallucination...the tragedy perpetually accessible and elusive, too easy and too impossible to imagine"--Ed Park, The Village Voice. "Risky, raucous, filled with moments of audacious beauty, Immensity proves that West, our foremost word wizard, won't play it safe, unlike so many American artists."--Bill Marx, WBUR radio (Boston NPR).

About this title

About the Author

PAUL WEST is the author of some twenty novels and a dozen works of non-fiction, most recently Cheops, a novel set in Ancient Egypt, and Oxford Days, a memoir of his student days.

Paul West’s awards include the Lannan Prize for Fiction, the Literature Prize of the American Academy, and the designation Chevalier of Arts and Letters from the Government of France. He studied at Oxford and Columbia, and in 2000 received the first Art-of-Fact Prize offered by the State University of New York.

From Booklist

West, an intrepid and adept prospector of the psyche, provides an atomizing rumination on the emotional shock waves of 9/11. Shrop has lost his memory in the wake of the destruction of the World Trade Center, and is in therapy with a longtime friend, Quent, a disabled and eccentric war veteran. Quent is supplying Shrop with the missing pieces of his past, but could Shrop really have been a Cambridge don, gardener's assistant, music theorist, and medical lab assistant? No matter, Quent is more concerned with visiting Ground Zero in full military regalia, and West's manifold, tumultuous, and satirical meditation on the soul-wrenching strangeness and horror of that blasted place, that mass grave, are at once provoking and intensely moving. Shrop seeks solace in contemplating the island's deep geologic past and the prescient beauty of its old Indian name, Idlewild, meaning "peaceful and savage," but warrior Quent is determined to take a last stand. West's phenomenal command of language and the flux of consciousness, and epic sense of the significance of 9/11 are staggering in their verve, astuteness, and resonance. Donna Seaman
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About this edition

• Publisher: Voyant Publishing
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0966599853
• ISBN 13: 9780966599855
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240