The Bend of the World: A Novel - Softcover

Bacharach, Jacob

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1631490001 ISBN 13: 9781631490002

Publisher: Liveright, 2015

Synopsis

“Bacharach has a great comic voice― shrewd, deadpan, and dirty―and The Bend of the World fears no weirdness.”―Sam Lipsyte

“Mighty strange doings” mark the Pittsburgh of Jacob Bacharach’s audacious and hilarious debut novel, a town where “yeti, UFOs, rumors of orgiastic rites, intimations of the Mayan apocalypse and ‘psycho-temporal distortions’ add that extra zing to the bustling night life” (James Wolcott). On the edge of thirty, and comfortably adrift in life, Peter Morrison finds his personal and professional life taking a turn for the weird as his attempts to transition into adulthood are thwarted by conspiracies both real and imagined. In this madcap coming-of-age novel, where no one quite comes of age, Bacharach brings an “immensely entertaining” and “Vonnegut-like sensibility” (Library Journal ) to the “aptly surreal satire” (Dan Chaon) of hipsters, corporations, and American life in the adolescent years of the twenty-first century. “A disarming, intelligent and seriously funny debut,” The Bend of the World “marks the arrival of Jacob Bacharach as a writer to watch” (Bob Hoover, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette).

About this title

About the Author

Jacob Bacharach is the author of The Bend of the World and The Doorposts of Your House and on Your Gates. His writing has appeared in the New Republic and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. He lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

From Booklist

UFOs have been spotted in the sky over Pittsburgh. Legislation has been introduced locally to make it legal to hunt Bigfoots—uh, Bigfeet. Peter’s company has been acquired by an impersonal, international corporation, and his new boss, who always sports a Visitor badge, may be a sociopath . . . or an alien from another dimension. Peter’s best friend, Johnny, is up to his eyebrows in the occult, having fallen in with the seedy author of a celebrated work of science fiction . . . or science fact? Is it the end of the world? Or is it the bend of the world? “There’s more world beyond the horizon,” Peter tells his boss, and the two have a good laugh. Will readers? Well, Bacharach’s surreal novel is inarguably amusing, a trippy exercise in ontology. But because alcohol is imbibed and drugs are ingested, the truth is both clear and unclear. So what is reality and what is imagined or, better, hallucinated? Ultimately, it’s left to the reader to decide, for it’s ambiguity that rules Peter’s world. --Michael Cart

About this edition

• Publisher: Liveright
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1631490001
• ISBN 13: 9781631490002
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320