Colors Insulting to Nature
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A hilarious and original debut novel that skewers our craze for celebrity.
Liza Normal, like a million teenagers before her, wants desperately to be famous. If she can't be famous, she'll settle for infamy. But no Pop Idol contest on earth will ever crown someone like Liza, with her spookily vulgar 'vocal stylings' and her stripper's wardrobe. Her wits addled by celebrity culture, the ashes of failed stardom in her mouth, she decides to turn her back on her tinsel dreams and embrace her outsider status with a ferocious purity.
Colors Insulting to Nature is a brazenly hilarious odyssey through teen humiliation: the crushes who spurn her, the revenges gone wrong, and the dawning realization that life doesn't come with a soundtrack that tells you when to laugh and cry or an audience to applaud at the end. Cintra Wilson is a pyrotechnic wit – the natural heir to Douglas Coupland and the challenger to Dave Eggers. This novel will have readers howling with laughter and writhing with retrospective embarrassment. She is a staggering talent.
Reviews
Reviews for Wilson’s plays:
‘Incisive, inflamed, inflammatory, offensive, astute, vulgar, mean, wildly funny, compassionate, and sweeping’ Boston Globe
‘A brilliant writer with a deliciously warped and blisteringly wiseass take’ Entertainment Weekly
‘Storms the cheesy walls of popular culture like a band of punk-chick Visigoths, and ravages the sequin clad icons within’ Time Out New York
‘If she keeps being so funny and brutal, she’ll end up famous herself’ USA Today
About the author
Cintra Wilson is a playwright, essayist and former columnist. Her essays on the disease of celebrity were collected into a book called A Massive Swelling and functioned as research for this novel. She lives in New York; Colors Insulting To Nature is her first novel.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A starred review indicates a book of outstanding quality. A review with a blue-tinted title indicates a book of unusual commercial interest that hasn't received a starred review.COLORS INSULTING TO NATURECintra Wilson. HarperCollins/Fourth Estate, (368p) Playwright and Salon columnist Wilson made a name for herself four years ago with her essay collection, A Massive Swelling. In her raucous, hilarious debut novel, she covers similar ground: the ugly side of fame and America's unhealthy obsession with celebrity. The dark Gen-X fairy tale follows the adventures of Liza Normal, a would-be starlet with far more ambition than looks or talent. Saddled with a frightening stage mother, Peppy, Liza "not a girl ruled by the logic of self-preservation" endures humiliation after humiliation as she acts in an unintentionally campy family musical, turns punk, dates a drug dealer and a washed-up boy band member, goes to rehab and tries unsuccessfully to make it big in Hollywood. The indefatigable Liza finally triumphs in Las Vegas, creating a stage show based on a character from the softcore slash fiction she's written throughout her travails. Wilson goes out on a limb with her verbal extravagance, and readers may find her post-Eggers postmodern asides to the audience (whom she calls "Young Readerlings") and fancy fonts a bit too-too. But her spirited sendup of celebrity worship is laugh-out-loud funny.
