Items related to The Tragedy of Arthur: A Novel

The Tragedy of Arthur: A Novel - Softcover

 
9780812977929: The Tragedy of Arthur: A Novel
View all copies of this ISBN edition:
 
 

The Tragedy of Arthur is an emotional and elaborately constructed tour de force from “one of the best writers in America” (The Washington Post). Its doomed hero is Arthur Phillips, a young novelist struggling with a con artist father who works wonders of deception. Imprisoned for decades and nearing the end of his life, Arthur’s father reveals a treasure he’s kept secret for half a century: The Tragedy of Arthur, a previously unknown play by William Shakespeare. Arthur and his twin sister inherit their father’s mission: to see the manuscript published and acknowledged as the Bard’s last great gift to humanity . . . unless it’s their father’s last great con. By turns hilarious and haunting, this virtuosic novel, which includes Shakespeare’s (?) lost play in its entirety, brilliantly subverts our notions of truth, fiction, genius, and identity, as the two Arthurs—the novelist and the ancient king—play out their strangely intertwined fates.

A New York Times Notable Book · A New Yorker Reviewers’ Favorite of the Year · A Wall Street Journal Best Novel of the Year · A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year · A Chicago Tribune Favorite Book of the Year · A Library Journal Top Ten Book of the Year · A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year · One of Salon’s five best novels of the year

Look for special features inside. Join the Circle for author chats and more.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

About the Author:
Arthur Phillips is the internationally bestselling author of three New York Times Notable Books—Prague, the winner of the Los Angeles Times/Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction; The Song Is You; and The Tragedy of Arthur—and The Egyptologist. He lives in New York.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
INTRODUCTION
 
ARTHUR PHILLIPS
 
INTERNATIONALLY BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF
Prague, The Egyptologist, Angelica, AND The Song Is You
 
 
If you do not feel the impossibility of this speech having been written by Shakespeare, all I dare suggest is that you may have ears—for so has another animal—but an ear you cannot have.
—SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, about Henry VI, Part One
 
·
 
Shakespeare never did this. He never did this.
—THE BLOW MONKEYS, “Don’t Give It Up”
 
·
 
Believe me, my friends, that men, not very much inferior to Shakespeare, are this day being born on the banks of the Ohio.
—HERMAN MELVILLE
 
·
 
Phillips himself evidently wanted to carry the performance outside the walls of the playhouse.
—STEPHEN GREENBLATT, Will in the World
 
1
 
IHAVE NEVER MUCH LIKED SHAKESPEARE. I find the plays more pleasant to read than to watch, but I could do without him, up to and including this unstoppable and unfortunate book. I know that is not a very literary or learned thing to confess, but there it is. I wonder if there isn’t a large and shy population of tasteful readers who secretly agree with me. I would add that The Tragedy of Arthur is as good as most of his stuff, or as bad, and I suppose it is plausible (vocabulary, style, etc.) that he wrote it. Full disclosure: I state that as the party with the most money to be made in this venture.
 
As a cab driver asked in an ironic tone when I told him I was contractually bound to write something about Shakespeare, “And what hasn’t been written about him yet?” Perhaps this: although it is probably not evident to anyone outside my immediate family and friends, my own career as a novelist has been shadowed by my family’s relationship to Shakespeare, specifically my father and twin sister’s adoration of his work. A certain amount of cheap psychology turns out to be true: because of our family’s early dynamics, I have as an adult always tried to impress these two idealized readers with my own language and imagination, and have always hoped someday to hear them say they preferred me and my work to Shakespeare and his.
 
Even as I write that—as I commit it to print and thereby make it true—I know it is ridiculous. I cannot really feel that I am in competition with this man born four hundred years to the day before me. There is nothing in the clichéd description of him as the greatest writer in the English language that should have anything to do with me, my place in literature, the love of my family, or my own “self-esteem,” to use an embarrassing word stinking of redemptive memoirs. I should be glad for the few lines of his that I like and think nothing of the rest, ignore the daffy religion that is the world’s mad love of him. (Or, in the case of those troubled folk who don’t think he wrote Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet, equally mad disbelief.)
 
I am not by nature a memoirist, any more than Shakespeare was. I am a novelist. But if you are to understand this play, its history, and how it came to be here, a certain quantity of my autobiography is unavoidable. Nobody comes off particularly well in the story of how we arrived here, except perhaps my sister, Dana. I certainly am not the hero. But I do have the legal right to occupy this discovery space outside the play for as long as I wish. No one may lay a red pen on me here, so if these turn out to be the last words of mine that Random House ever publishes, they will at least be true, and the record will be set straight, if only for a while, before it rewarps.
 
I will perform my contractual requirements—history, synopsis, editing, notes—but I have other things to say as well, and a few apologies to issue, before I creep offstage.
 
2
 
MY PARENTS LIVED TOGETHER until Dana and I were six. Memories of that early age are untrustworthy except as a measure of the predominant emotion at the time. When I summon images of the four of us together, I recall happiness: pervasive, aromatic, connected to textures and weather and faces. (I suspect those faces are not real memories, exactly. They are memory-animations of old photos I have, or imagined snapshots of old stories I’ve heard.)
 
My father emerges first as a man who conquered night, who never slept. This is not an uncommon idea children have of their parents: kids at five, six, seven have to go to bed when the adults are awake, and they wake to find those adults already in action. If you do not live with them again after this age, parents will survive in memory as creatures magically exempt from slumber. But my father was even more a figure of the night than that. I remember several occasions when he woke me in darkest black (perhaps only nine P.M., but by then a five-year-old is already deep beneath a wash of delta waves), excited to share some great news or show me some once-in-a-lifetime event. “Wake up, Bear! Bear! You have to see this. Wake up!”
 
I was asleep, my beloved solar-system book fallen on my chest, my fingers still voyaging over its black and starry cover. I was asleep, and then I was in his arms, flying from my bed, awake and asleep and back and forth, and then I was out on the wet lawn, still cradled in his arms, barely able to peel open my crusted eye, to look, at his whispered urging, into his tripodded, heaven-angling telescope’s eyepiece. And there I saw Saturn, my favorite: ringed, unworldly, a giant top among specks of dust. And then he turned some dial, fiddled somehow with the telescope’s lenses and settings, and he brought the view much closer, and I could see a dozen of Saturn’s inhabitants, moving back and forth in their excitement, taking turns looking through their telescope, gesturing at what they saw, up in their own sky, amazed at the sight of me, trying to get my attention.
 
And then I was brought back to bed, and he kissed me back to sleep.
 
A little boy wakes from that and—first thing—consults with the most reliable and trusted person in his world for clarification. I asked my twin sister if she had had any dreams, as we often shared them in those suggestible days. “No, because Dad woke me up to see Saturn,” Dana replied matter-of-factually. “I love the rings. It’s the best planet. Except for Pluto.”
 
“No, Saturn’s better. Did you see the people?”
 
“Yeah, but Pluto’s better.”
 
This was as hotly as Dana and I ever disagreed about anything in those days.
 
Pancakes shaped like Saturn, pancakes shaped like Mickey Mouse, which, my father said, could occur accidentally. He would dramatically cover his eyes while dribbling the batter, and sure enough, every fifth pancake (we were five years old) was unmistakably Mickey. I used to take pleasure, even at that provably selfish age, in donating my Mickeys to Dana, and every time she thanked me with real amazement. I recall, too, a pancake with the uncanny profile of my mother, placed before her with a long kiss from the chef to the top of her head. “You’ve got butter on your nose,” he said, placing a dollop on her pancake’s leftmost tip.
 
(I made pancakes for my own kids in my day. Perhaps it was the Czech flour, but my repertoire consisted solely of ovals and Pollocks. Their Aunt Dana never did any better when she visited.)
 
Our mother took us to an exhibit of Dad’s paintings. She made us dress up. I had a little bow tie. Dana and I were allowed to walk around on our own, soda in paper cups, hand in hand, and we made each other laugh with stories about each painting, Dad’s and others in the group show. We sat on a wooden bench and watched our mother put her hand on our father’s back, his tumbleweed of black Einstein hair swaying slightly from the rotating floor fan. We blew bubbles in our 7UP, and I made fart sounds for Dana.
 
“Those last group shows,” my mother reported much later. “So depressing.”
 
But not for us. My father’s increasingly desperate and pathetic final efforts at being an acknowledged artist had no effect on me and Dana just yet. His anger at the world’s indifference was imperceptible to us, and that is to his credit, or due to children’s natural indifference. For us, the adult world was soda on wooden benches, paintings and stories, midnight glimpses of Saturnine astronomers, magic pancakes. Our father amazed us and won our love not because he treated us like children, but because we thought he was treating us like adults, and adulthood was just a much better childhood.
 
 

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.

Other Popular Editions of the Same Title

9781400066476: The Tragedy of Arthur: A Novel

Featured Edition

ISBN 10:  ISBN 13:  9781400066476
Publisher: Random House, 2011
Hardcover

9780715643662: The Tragedy of Arthur. by Arthur Phillips

Duckwo..., 2012
Softcover

9780715641378: The Tragedy of Arthur

Gerald..., 2011
Hardcover

Top Search Results from the AbeBooks Marketplace

Seller Image

Phillips, Arthur
ISBN 10: 0812977920 ISBN 13: 9780812977929
New Soft Cover Quantity: 10
Seller:
booksXpress
(Bayonne, NJ, U.S.A.)

Book Description Soft Cover. Condition: new. Seller Inventory # 9780812977929

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
US$ 13.48
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: FREE
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds
Seller Image

Phillips, Arthur
ISBN 10: 0812977920 ISBN 13: 9780812977929
New Softcover Quantity: 5
Seller:
GreatBookPrices
(Columbia, MD, U.S.A.)

Book Description Condition: New. Seller Inventory # 16073547-n

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
US$ 11.83
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: US$ 2.64
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds
Stock Image

PHILLIPS, ARTHUR
Published by Penguin Random House (2012)
ISBN 10: 0812977920 ISBN 13: 9780812977929
New Softcover Quantity: > 20
Seller:
INDOO
(Avenel, NJ, U.S.A.)

Book Description Condition: New. Brand New. Seller Inventory # 0812977920

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
US$ 10.78
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: US$ 3.99
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds
Stock Image

Arthur Phillips
ISBN 10: 0812977920 ISBN 13: 9780812977929
New Paperback Quantity: 1
Seller:
Grand Eagle Retail
(Wilmington, DE, U.S.A.)

Book Description Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. The Tragedy of Arthur is an emotional and elaborately constructed tour de force from one of the best writers in America (The Washington Post). Its doomed hero is Arthur Phillips, a young novelist struggling with a con artist father who works wonders of deception. Imprisoned for decades and nearing the end of his life, Arthurs father reveals a treasure hes kept secret for half a century: The Tragedy of Arthur, a previously unknown play by William Shakespeare. Arthur and his twin sister inherit their fathers mission: to see the manuscript published and acknowledged as the Bards last great gift to humanity . . . unless its their fathers last great con. By turns hilarious and haunting, this virtuosic novel, which includes Shakespeares (?) lost play in its entirety, brilliantly subverts our notions of truth, fiction, genius, and identity, as the two Arthursthe novelist and the ancient kingplay out their strangely intertwined fates.A New York Times Notable Book A New Yorker Reviewers Favorite of the Year A Wall Street Journal Best Novel of the Year A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year A Chicago Tribune Favorite Book of the Year A Library Journal Top Ten Book of the Year A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year One of Salons five best novels of the yearLook for special features inside. Join the Circle for author chats and more. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability. Seller Inventory # 9780812977929

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
US$ 18.99
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: FREE
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds
Stock Image

Arthur Phillips
Published by Random House (2012)
ISBN 10: 0812977920 ISBN 13: 9780812977929
New Softcover Quantity: 3
Seller:
Books Puddle
(New York, NY, U.S.A.)

Book Description Condition: New. Seller Inventory # 264300582

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
US$ 16.28
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: US$ 3.99
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds
Stock Image

Phillips, Arthur
ISBN 10: 0812977920 ISBN 13: 9780812977929
New Paperback Quantity: 1
Seller:
GoldenWavesOfBooks
(Fayetteville, TX, U.S.A.)

Book Description Paperback. Condition: new. New. Fast Shipping and good customer service. Seller Inventory # Holz_New_0812977920

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
US$ 21.52
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: US$ 4.00
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds
Stock Image

Phillips, Arthur
ISBN 10: 0812977920 ISBN 13: 9780812977929
New Paperback Quantity: 1
Seller:
Wizard Books
(Long Beach, CA, U.S.A.)

Book Description Paperback. Condition: new. New. Seller Inventory # Wizard0812977920

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
US$ 25.76
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: US$ 3.50
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds
Stock Image

Phillips, Arthur
ISBN 10: 0812977920 ISBN 13: 9780812977929
New Paperback Quantity: 1
Seller:
GoldBooks
(Austin, TX, U.S.A.)

Book Description Paperback. Condition: new. New Copy. Customer Service Guaranteed. Seller Inventory # think0812977920

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
US$ 25.81
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: US$ 4.25
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds
Stock Image

Phillips, Arthur
ISBN 10: 0812977920 ISBN 13: 9780812977929
New Softcover Quantity: 1
Seller:
Front Cover Books
(Denver, CO, U.S.A.)

Book Description Condition: new. Seller Inventory # FrontCover0812977920

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
US$ 30.12
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: US$ 4.30
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds
Seller Image

Phillips, Arthur
ISBN 10: 0812977920 ISBN 13: 9780812977929
New Softcover Quantity: 5
Seller:
GreatBookPricesUK
(Castle Donington, DERBY, United Kingdom)

Book Description Condition: New. Seller Inventory # 16073547-n

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
US$ 20.46
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: US$ 19.10
From United Kingdom to U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds

There are more copies of this book

View all search results for this book