Only Revolutions
A Novel
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
iBooks Exclusive
The National Book Award finalist, now available for the first time as an eBook. ONLY REVOLUTIONS: THE INTERACTIVE eBOOK is unlike anything ever published before. Experience Mark Z. Danielewski’s epic creation—Sam & Hailey, Hailey & Sam, side by side, powered by an ever-rotating fleet of cars, cutting a nation in half as they try to outrace History itself.
This interactive eBook includes:
· A side-by-side, scrolling narrative easily oriented to read Sam and Hailey, or Hailey and then Sam.
· Over 300 pop-up annotations. Many “road signs” also link to other places in the eBook, encouraging readers to follow themes such as Identity, Freedom, Sex & Violence, Time Travel, and Romance throughout the text.
· Original music by pianist and public radio host Christopher O’Riley.
· Forewords by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum (Madeleine Is Sleeping) and Michael Robbins (Alien vs. Predator).
By turns enticing and exhilarating, beguiling and gripping, worldwrecking and breathtaking, Only Revolutions is a remarkable feat of heart and intellect, moving us with the journey of two kids, perpetually of summer, perpetually sixteen, who give up everything except each other.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A pastiche of Joyce and Beckett, with heapings of Derrida's Glas and Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 thrown in for good measure, Danielewski's follow-up to House of Leaves is a similarly dizzying tour of the modernist and postmodernist heights and a similarly impressive tour de force. It comprises two monologues, one by Sam and one by Hailey, both "Allmighty sixteen and freeeeee," each narrating the same road trip, or set of neo-globo-revolutionary events or a revolution's end: "Everyone loves the Dream but I kill it." Figuring out what's happening is a big part of reading the book. The verse-riffs narrations, endlessly alliterative and punning (like Joyce) and playfully, bleakly existential (like Beckett), begin at opposite ends of the book, upside down from one another, with each page divided and shared. Each gets 180 words per page, but in type that gets smaller as they get closer to their ends (Glas was more haphazard), so they each gets exactly half a page only at the midway point of the book: page 180 or half of a revolution of 360 degrees. A time line of world events, from November 22, 1863 ("the abolition of slavery"), to January 19, 2063 (blank, like everything from January 18, 2006, on), runs down the side of every page. The page numbers, when riffled flip-book style, revolve. The book's design is a marvel, and as a feat of Pynchonesque puzzlebookdom, it's magnificent. The book's difficulty, though, carries a self-consciousness that Joyce & Co. decidedly lack, and the jury will be out on whether the tricks are of the for-art's-sake variety or more like a terrific video game.
