Threshold - Hardcover

Doyle, Rob

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1635574145 ISBN 13: 9781635574142

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020

Synopsis

"Game and gleefully provocative . . . My treasured companion of late.” -New York Times

"Threshold, or, how I learned to stop worrying (about what sort of novel this is) and love the narrator, whose brilliance and humor on drugs and literature, sex and boredom and death, leave me in awe." -Rachel Kushner

"Fearless and challenging, inventive and compulsive, unique and utterly heartfelt." -John Boyne

“Daring and deranged, endlessly entertaining, furiously funny.” -Geoff Dyer

“Playful, potent, lurid, moving, and fearless.” -Lisa McInerney

“[A] modern day odyssey.” -Teddy Wayne

“A Pilgrim's Progress for our time.” -Mike McCormack

“A thrilling mutation . . . [Doyle's] is a journey you don't want to miss.” -Chris Power

An uninhibited portrait of the artist as a perpetual drifter and truth-seeker--a funny, profound, compulsive read that's like traveling with your wildest and most philosophical friend.

The narrator of Rob Doyle's Threshold has spent the last two decades traveling, writing, and imbibing drugs and literature in equal measure, funded by brief periods of employment or “on the dole” in Dublin. Now, stranded between reckless youth and middle age, his travels to far-flung places have acquired a de facto purpose: to aid the contemporary artist's search for universal truth.

Following Doyle from Buddhism to the brink of madness, Threshold immerses us in the club-drug communalism of the Berlin underworld, the graves of myth-chasing artists in Paris, and the shattering and world-rebuilding revelations brought on by the psychedelic DMT, the so-called “spirit molecule.”

Exulting in the rootlessness of the wanderer, Doyle exists in a lineage of writer-characters-W. G. Sebald, Ben Lerner, Maggie Nelson, and Rachel Cusk-deftly and subversively exploring forms between theory and autobiography. Insightful and provocative, Threshold is a darkly funny, genuinely optimistic, compulsively readable celebration of perception and desire, of what is here and what is beyond our comprehension.

About this title

About the Author

Rob Doyle was born in Dublin. His first novel, Here Are the Young Men, was published in 2014. It was chosen as a book of the year by the Sunday Times, Irish Times and Independent, and was among Hot Press magazine's '20 Greatest Irish Novels 1916-2016'. Doyle has adapted it for a film with director Eoin Macken. Doyle's collection of short stories, This is the Ritual, was published by Bloomsbury in 2016. Doyle is the editor of the The Other Irish Tradition (Dalkey Archive Press), and In This Skull Hotel Where I Never Sleep (Broken Dimanche Press). His writing has appeared in the Guardian, Vice, TLS, Dublin Review, and many other publications, and he writes a weekly books column for the Irish Times. He teaches on the Creative Writing MFA at the University of Limerick, and lives the rest of the year in Berlin.

robdoyle.net / Twitter: @RobDoyle1 / Instagram: skullhotel

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1635574145
• ISBN 13: 9781635574142
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 336