Wolf In White Van - Softcover

Darnielle, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1443437387 ISBN 13: 9781443437387

Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers, 2014

Synopsis

Welcome to Trace Italian, a game of strategy and survival! You may now make your first move.

Isolated by a disfiguring injury since the age of seventeen, Sean Phillips crafts imaginary worlds for strangers to play in. From his small apartment in southern California, he orchestrates fantastic adventures where possibilities, both dark and bright, open in the boundaries between the real and the imagined. As the creator of Trace Italian—a text-based, role-playing game played through the mail—Sean guides players from around the world through his intricately imagined terrain, which they navigate and explore, turn by turn, seeking sanctuary in a ravaged, savage future America.

Lance and Carrie are high school students from Florida, explorers of the Trace. But when they take their play into the real world, disaster strikes, and Sean is called to account for it. In the process, he is pulled back through time, tunneling toward the moment of his own self-inflicted departure from the world in which most people live.

Brilliantly constructed, Wolf in White Van unfolds in reverse until we arrive at both the beginning and the climax: the event that has shaped so much of Sean’s life. Beautifully written and unexpectedly moving, John Darnielle’s Wolf in White Van is an audacious and gripping debut novel, a marvel of storytelling brio and genuine literary delicacy.

About this title

About the Author:

JOHN DARNIELLE’s first novel, Wolf in White Van, was a New York Times bestseller, a National Book Award nominee and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for first fiction, and was widely hailed as one of the best novels of the year. He is the writer, composer, guitarist and vocalist for the band the Mountain Goats. He lives in Durham, North Carolina, with his wife and sons.

Review:

A stunning meditation on the power of escape, and on the cat-and-mouse contest the self plays to deflect its own guilt. (New York Times Book Review (Editor’s Choice))

[A] strange and involving novel . . . about alienation and despair and the search for meaning. . . . What drives Wolf in White Van is Mr. Darnielle’s uncanny sense of what it’s like to feel marginalized, an outsider, a freak. (New York Times)

The prose is spare yet fervent, both distant and rawly exposed, making for an eerie, awkward and compelling novel that immediately demands a second read. (The Guardian)

A quietly devastating book that’s not easily forgotten. (Winnipeg Free Press)

In Darnielle’s novel, as in his songs, the monstrously true and unbelievably beautiful press up against one another. Together, they begin to dance. (NPR)

The next logical step for someone who’s filled 14 studio albums, 23 EPs, and four compilations with relatable characters, dramatic situations, and recognizably literary themes like spirituality, drug addiction, and more. . . . Wolf in White Van is the work of a real writer. (Pitchfork)

An electric debut novel with the sweetest ruminations on Conan the Barbarian ever written. (O Magazine)

[Wolf in White Van] will back you onto your heels with its capacity for inventiveness in structure, story, and line-writing. (GQ)

Sean’s life of minutiae, from simple charcoal drawings hung on the wall to terrible, Conan-inspired cassette tapes, makes his character come to animated, imperfectly perfect life. This attention to detail, this humanity, makes the book a joy. (Paste)

The prose is often cryptic and then stunningly clear, microscopically specific and then audaciously grand. The words soothe for sentences at a time, then strike with blunt force. (Slate)

About this edition

• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1443437387
• ISBN 13: 9781443437387
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224