The Lost Scrapbook - Softcover

Dara, Evan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1573660388 ISBN 13: 9781573660389

Publisher: Fiction Collective 2, 1998

Synopsis

It may be the defining irony of our time: just as we are coming to recognize our shared destiny and necessary interdependence, our culture seems to be fracturing along every fault line available to it. The Lost Scrapbook is a novel that passionately captures the contradictory richness of our historical slot, a time when feelings of belonging and exclusion can do bitter battle. Conjuring an unforgettable variety of voices, the book delves into lives touched by this tension, before it culminates in a confrontation between a trusting city and the local manufacturing company that both sustains and betrays it.
Through the use of a prismatic storytelling form, The Lost Scrapbook finds a contemporary answer to the 19th century novel, evoking an entire world in all its richness and diversity. But by embodying the sense that we can best understand our world through witnessing the interworkings of whole communities, it is also something altogether new: The Lost Scrapbook may be the first "holistic" novel.

About this title

About the Author

One of the most exciting American novelists writing today. --The Times Literary Supplement (England)

Review

Monumental, cunning, and unforgiving. A vast accomplishment. --Richard Powers

An encyclopedic masterpiece that invites comparisons to the big books of postmodernism. --American Book Review

Evan Dara's magnificent novel [is crafted] as if James Joyce had widened the narrative ear of Ulysses. If this really is Mr. Dara's first novel, then he is either a young phenom or a well-practiced, reclusive treasure. --Chelsea Review

The prime candidate [for] the contemporary Moby-Dick, the book of great merit unsupported by media influence. --Stephen J. Burn, author of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest: A Reader's Guide

Powerful, hysterically funny and evocative. Stretches the boundaries of what novels can be and mean.. --The Los Angeles Reader

Published [almost] the same year as Infinite Jest, this book is as formally ambitious, except honestly better. It makes postmodernism, and reading, worth the effort.
--The Fader

Some have called this the best American novel of the 1990s... Anyone with even a passing interest in the contemporary novel needs to read this book, which is truly a lost classic. This is a great book that deserves a wider readership. --Known Unknowns

Undoubtedly an exceptional literary work [and] a rare exercise of artistic freedom... I believe with all certainty that [The Lost Scrapbook] deserves to occupy a prominent place in the canon of the American novel. --Robert Saladrigas, La Vanguardia newspaper (Barcelona)

"A dazzling blow," "An unknown masterwork," "We are surely before one of the best books of contemporary literature," "A novel of the highest narrative importance for its generation and for the ones to follow, which has been (and continues to be) mercilessly ignored," "The first novel written in THX" --(reviews from Spain)

This book, little read but hyperbolically praised and cultishly adored by those who have, had been on my radar for some time... I described praise for The Lost Scrapbook as hyperbolic, but I kinda have to take that back. All of the praise it receives is perfectly due. As much as I hate agreeing with anyone ever, it must be said: it's a visionary novel, completely sure-handed, and I've never read anything like it. Compare it to Pynchon or Gaddis if you must, but Dara's work really has nothing in common with theirs... If we had more of a literary culture, this is a book that would be hailed as Important. I sure am glad that it's out there for those who seek it. --Inchoatia

About this edition

• Publisher: Fiction Collective 2
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 1573660388
• ISBN 13: 9781573660389
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 476