Description
Book SynopsisShame is a daring exploration of the potential and limits of autofiction, wherein certain authentic features of the author’s life are written alongside fictitious ones. Here we meet Grant Maierhofer at various points within his life then, now, and in the future as he investigates the sense of shame that haunts the course of his days. The real and unreal, fact and fiction, blur together in a Kaufmanesque sequence of overlapping narratives about of who we really are, how we cope with regret, and the repetitions of our behavior.
Through lists, fragments, recollections, and rants, the story of a son’s vexing grief for his father emerges. A sober addict trying to figure out how to navigate pleasure, diversion, and escape. A father trying to figure out marriage, children, maturity, and responsibility. A confused observer in a world constantly torn apart by media, politics, and aggression. A meditation on the nature of art, and art’s place in contemporary life.
Trade Review“At a time when the novel seems caught between the twin pillars of autofiction and agitprop, Grant Maierhofer’s
Shame brings us something new. Working in the tradition of Beckett, or Bernhard, Maierhofer cuts his self-loathing with tenderness, with melancholy, with deadpan wit and vulnerability. The result is a book that feels unlike any other I can think of: supple, kaleidoscopic, at once intimate and vast. A novel that seems—somehow—practically infinite.”—Matthew Specktor, author of
American Dream Machine and
Always Crashing in the Same Car “It’s like Kafka’s cockroach. It’s like Stephen Daedalus yammering metaphysics. It’s like Robert Lowell’s ill spirit sobbing. It’s like Henry Miller stumble drunk. It’s like Kerouac in Mexico, wild, undisciplined, pure, the crazier the better. Thus the sordid erudition and crazy wisdom of Grant Maierhofer’s
Shame.”—Curtis White, author of
Living in a World That Can't Be Fixed “Naked, wry, obsessed with loss, fear, existential shock before our hyperbolic now, Grant Maierhofer’s
Shame is a stunning innovative serpent ever in the act of swallowing its own wounded, hyperaware tail and tale, reminding us on every page that nonfiction is nothing if not a troubled and troubling suburb of fiction where the self can honestly be told only in a series of jittery approximations.”—Lance Olsen, author of
Skin Elegies “Alternately raw, fiery, poetic, and sentimental, the author’s take can . . . show levity, as when describing tender moments with his wife . . . when Maierhofer’s cathartic ruminations hit, they hit hard.”
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Publisher’s Weekly
