Dickens and Prince
A Particular Kind of Genius
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4.4 • 10 Ratings
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
“An ardent fan letter from Hornby that makes you want to re-read Great Expectations while listening to Sign o’ the Times.” —Vogue
"This pairing -- two magnificent creatives, centuries and genres apart -- makes stunning sense in the hands of their wisest, wittiest fan." -- People
From the bestselling author of Just Like You, High Fidelity, and Fever Pitch, a short, warm, and entertaining book about art, creativity, and the unlikely similarities between Victorian novelist Charles Dickens and modern American rock star Prince
Every so often, a pairing comes along that seems completely unlikely—until it’s not. Peanut butter and jelly, Dennis Rodman and Kim Jong Un, ducks and puppies, and now: Dickens and Prince.
Equipped with a fan’s admiration and his trademark humor and wit, Nick Hornby invites us into his latest obsession: the cosmic link between two unlikely artists, geniuses in their own rights, spanning race, class, and centuries—each of whom electrified their different disciplines and whose legacy resounded far beyond their own time.
When Prince’s 1987 record Sign o’ the Times was rereleased in 2020, the iconic album now came with dozens of songs that weren’t on the original— Prince was endlessly prolific, recording 102 songs in 1986 alone. In awe, Hornby began to wonder, Who else ever produced this much? Who else ever worked that way? He soon found his answer in Victorian novelist and social critic Charles Dickens, who died more than a hundred years before Prince began making music.
Examining the two artists’ personal tragedies, social statuses, boundless productivity, and other parallels, both humorous and haunting, Hornby shows how these two unlikely men from different centuries “lit up the world.” In the process, he creates a lively, stimulating rumination on the creativity, flamboyance, discipline, and soul it takes to produce great art.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
What did writer Charles Dickens and musician Prince have in common? "They have both lived on, of course, but more vigorously than one might have expected," according to this breezy take on creativity by Hornby (Just Like You). For Hornby, both men are sui generis talents, and he finds no shortage of parallels between them as he unpacks the artists' lives, the movies (or Dickens's case, musicals) their work inspired, their mid-career productivity, and their business conflicts (Prince battled with his record label, Dickens railed against intellectual theft). A mixture of speculation and research comprises the section "Women," which explores Dickens's and Prince's wives, lovers, and muses. Hornby writes that Prince was a "relatively rare creature, the androgynous heterosexual," while Dickens's penchant for younger women was a "weakness." At the end of their lives—Prince died from an accidental painkiller overdose, and Dickens was felled by a stroke—Hornby concludes that both had become cultural touchstones, but were hopelessly addicted to work. Hornby's admiration for his subjects is infectious, though readers who come to this with a basic knowledge with either artist will find much of the terrain covered here familiar. Even so, it's a zesty tribute to two cultural legends not often spoken about in the same breath.
