Mira Corpora
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- 6,99 €
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- 6,99 €
Publisher Description
Mira Corpora is the debut novel from acclaimed playwright Jeff Jackson, an inspired, dreamlike adventure by a distinctive new talent.
Literary and inventive, but also fast-paced and gripping, Mira Corpora charts the journey of a young runaway. A coming-of-age story for people who hate coming-of-age stories, featuring a colony of outcast children, teenage oracles, amusement parks haunted by gibbons, mysterious cassette tapes and a reclusive underground rockstar.
With astounding precision, Jackson weaves a moving tale of discovery and self-preservation across a startling, vibrant landscape.
Reviews
BOOK OF THE YEAR 2014 — Eimear McBride, New Statesman
‘Style is pre-eminent in Jeff Jackson's eerie and enigmatic debut. The prose works like the expressionless masks worn by killers in horror films.’
— Wall Street Journal
'So powerful it reaffirms my belief that the contemporary can still do remarkable things.'
— Lee Rourke
'There are few coming-of-age-esque novels that don’t make me feel like I’m being lied to, manipulated into caring to the point where I can’t care at all. Mira Corpora is one of those few.'
— VICE
‘It's fine work in its manic pacing and its summoning of certain cultural emblems. Present tense with a vengeance. I hope the book finds the serious readers who are out there waiting for this kind of fiction to hit them in the face.’
— Don DeLillo
‘[A] mesmerizing debut, which reads like some cross between Bruno Schulz and the backstories of random characters from Penelope Spheeris’ 1984 film Suburbia. It’s the overarching sensibility that also puts Mira Corpora in a unique group of books that can only be dubbed Punk Lit. ‘
— Flavorwire
‘Jeff Jackson's 'Mira Corpora' is a moving elegy to lost childhood in the dark recesses of America, where both magic and bleakness frequently occur. Jackson is a strong, powerful storyteller, occupying the space where Huck Finn, Dennis Cooper, Lana Del Ray, and Gus Van Sant meet.’
– Niven Govinden
About the author
Jeff Jackson holds an MFA from NYU and is the recipient of fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Five of his plays have been produced by the Obie Award–winning Collapsable Giraffe company.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The protagonist of Jackson's macabre and experimental debut novel is Jeff, the son of an abusive mother who runs away from home at the age of 11 and leads an itinerant existence, haunted by his childhood memories. The episodic chapters track the stages of Jeff's life before and after his break: at six, he experiences transcendent beauty while hunting; when he's 12 he falls in with a colony of disaffected youths who ritually burn a corpse; at 14, while homeless, he and some other teens pursue a messianic guitar player; and a year later, he falls in with a sadistic older man who tries to take control of his body and his life. By the end of Jeff's surreal odyssey, at the age of 18, his years of wandering and exile may be over when he learns of his mother's death. Through an often sordid and savage phantasmagoria, Jackson, also a playwright blurs the boundaries between the real and the imaginary, creating an unsettling allegory of growth into adulthood. Despite leanings toward the absurd, the discrete chapters tend to read more like short stories, and by the end they hardly cohere into a unified whole. A coming-of-age story that rushes by in a kind of lyrical scream, the novel cannot entirely live up to its considerable pretensions.
