The Metaphysical Ukulele
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
"Leave it to the audacious Sean Carswell to crack the code on this secret society of writers, especially after so many other publications (the Believer, Bitch, Vanity Fair) have tried and failed. I'm humbled and grateful to be immortalized in this wily, coltish collection with fellow strummers Flannery, Herman and weird old Uncle Thom."—Pam Houston
"On the surface, Carswell is a literary chameleon, moving effortlessly in and out of voices, genres, and styles, but underneath and above that, he is a born storyteller, always focused on his characters' hearts and minds and fitting ends."—Ben Loory, author of Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day
We all know Herman Melville, Jack Kerouac, Thomas Pynchon, Flannery O'Connor, Raymond Chandler, Chester Himes, and Pam Houston. Now meet their metaphysical ukuleles.
Mixing the flair of literary invention with real events in each writer's life—Herman Melville living with a tribe of cannibals; Raymond Chandler holding The Blue Dahlia hostage from Paramount Studios; Flannery O'Connor falling in love; Chester Himes threatening to decapitate his landlord, and many more—Sean Carswell takes the nonfiction of some our most famous writer's lives and turns it into exquisite fiction, with a ukulele thrown in for good measure. At times heartbreaking, at times absurd, the stories in this truly one-of-a-kind collection delightfully blur the line between what is life, and what is literature.
Sean Carswell is the author of the novels Drinks for the Little Guy, Train Wreck Girl, and Madhouse Fog, and the short story collections Barney's Crew and Glue and Ink Rebellion. He co-founded the independent book publisher Gorsky Press and the music magazine Razorcake. He currently teaches writing and literature at California State University, Channel Islands.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Carswell (Train Wreck Girl) returns with a humorous collection of short stories bound by a common object: a ubiquitous ukulele that appears in the hands of various well-known writers. The stories skillfully blend true anecdotes and fictitious tales of the lives of authors including Herman Melville, Flannery O'Connor, Jack Kerouac, and Thomas Pynchon, and some of the events described will have readers looking online to separate fact from fiction. The results are mixed; the best of the bunch is "The Bottom-Shelf Muse," which relates how Raymond Chandler held up shooting of the film The Blue Dahlia with a bad case of writer's block. Carswell emulates the writer's hard-boiled style effortlessly. Then there's "The Incognito Players," where Kristiani (a Pynchon fan so devoted she has a tattoo that's an homage to The Crying of Lot 49) joins a New York City based ukulele group that may or may not include the notoriously publicity-averse author. Though the ukulele conceit seems a little forced at times, Carswell excels at composing compelling, whimsical tales that reveal the human side of canonized authors, gently bringing them down from their pedestals.
