Our Secret Life in the Movies - Softcover

McGriff, Michael; Tyree, J. M.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0989275965 ISBN 13: 9780989275965

Publisher: A Strange Object, 2014

Synopsis

"A beautiful aftershock of the movies." -David Gordon Green
EVERYONE HAS A SECRET LIFE IN THE MOVIES...As featured on NPR's Weekend Edition. A whip-smart fiction debut inspired by classic and cult cinema, Our Secret Life in the Movies lures us into a lush dream world. These linked short stories follow two boys coming of age in the 1980s. Blade Runner and space camp collide with Reaganomics, food stamps, and the end of the Cold War in this haunting coauthored collection.
"Wildly intelligent and deeply felt, OUR SECRET LIFE IN THE MOVIES gives us a fascinating look at American life, shot through an insightful and compassionate lens. After reading it, the world seems bigger. A tremendous book." -Molly Antopol, author of The UnAmericans
"Reading OUR SECRET LIFE IN THE MOVIES is like finding a lost frequency on the AM dial. The voices you hear in this book are strange, hypnotic, and intensely American." -Jim Gavin, author of Middle Men
"OUR SECRET LIFE IN THE MOVIES deftly weaves together the art of film and the art of fiction to create a literary-cinematic adventure that is hauntingly beautiful, dreamily inventive, and thrillingly original." -Maud Casey, author of The Man Who Walked Away
"Tyree and McGriff conjure up lonliness, loss, and euphoria with the indelible resonance of an iconic tight shot." -Suzanne Rivecca, author of Death is Not an Option
"A book of poignant and affecting beauty. Readers are presented with characters who are losing their innocence in lockstep with the changing nation they inhabit, and the end result is a book that provides great insight into both who we are and how we got this way. A remarkable achievement." -Skip Horack, author of The Eden Hunter

"You don't need to see all, or any, of the movies on their list to love this book. You just need to have a secret life." -Maria Hummel, author of Motherland

About this title

About the Author

Michael McGriff's books include Home Burial (Copper Canyon Press, 2012), a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice selection; Dismantling the Hills; a translation of Tomas Tranströmer's The Sorrow Gondola (Green Integer, 2010); and an edition of David Wevill's essential writing, To Build My Shadow a Fire. He is a former Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer at Stanford University, and his work has been recognized with a Lannan Literary Fellowship and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. J. M. Tyree is the author of BFI Film Classics: Salesman, and the coauthor, with Ben Walters, of BFI Film Classics: The Big Lebowski, from the British Film Institute. His writing on cinema has been published in Sight & Sound, The Believer, and Film Quarterly. A former Truman Capote-Wallace Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University, he currently works as an associate editor of New England Review.

Review

"This collection is genius."
-NPR's Best Books of 2014

"This beautiful, devastating little book is quite unlike anything else I've ever encountered...it's specifically engineered to break your heart."
-Washington Post Book World

"Indelibly wrought."
-Vogue.com

"Brilliant."
-BBC.com

"A love letter to filmmaking...wondrous."
-The Rumpus

"As close to an interactive experience as reading a collection of cutting-edge short fiction can be...An intriguing, frequently affecting experiment that challenges its readers to think anew about sharpening and refracting their memories of both life and art." -Kirkus Reviews

"Unique and intimate...The voices in each story are distinctly American, and McGriff and Tyree each capture the essence of a decade."
-Electric Lit

"A stroke of cinematic endurance and literary brilliance."
-Texas Observer

"You can have perfectly refined taste, or you can have taste as unrefined as the sugar that people with refined culinary tastes are pleased to tell you they prefer to ingest, or you can be a schmuck who's only barely functionally literate, and I think you'll still love this book." -Austin Chronicle

"Light yet rewarding and serious reading."
-Flavorwire

"A coauthored mash note to cinema classics from Andrei Tarkovsky to Michael Mann."-The Paris Review Daily

About this edition

• Publisher: A Strange Object
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0989275965
• ISBN 13: 9780989275965
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 168