Search results for ""Author Jesse Anderson""

Anderson’s debut novel introduces readers to a writer of lucid, hallucinatory prose worthy of comparison with Roberto Bolaño, Cormac McCarthy, and José SaramagoLoosely based on events that occurred during the Chinese Civil War, The Western Contingent follows a group of forty-eight young men who unexpectedly find themselves recruited for a mysterious mission deemed vital to their country’s future prosperity.After undergoing a brief period of training and indoctrination, the peasants-turned-soldiers leave their hometown of Luan hungry for their first taste of combat. Doubt, however, soon sets in. Their colonel shows signs of mental instability, the people they’re supposedly fighting for treat them with indifference, and the purpose of their mission, as they continue marching west, only becomes more and more unclear. Anderson’s debut novel introduces readers to a writer of lucid, hallucinatory prose worthy of comparison with Roberto Bolaño, Cormac McCarthy, and José Saramago.

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Louis Meyer is an overworked aerospace engineer looking forward to a week-long vacation on the Mediterranean. DeMilo is an astronaut and self-proclaimed ladies’ man whose behavior borders on the obsessive and voyeuristic. When a series of coincidences and disasters-including a devastating earthquake in Marseilles-brings them together on a spacecraft with an aloof woman they are both strongly attracted to, the two men’s flaws and shortcomings emerge as they engage in an underhanded competition to win her over. Brimming with Jean Echenoz’s inimitable humor, We Three is both a satirical take on the adventure novel and subtle experiment with narrative point of view.

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The unnamed narrator of Francis Bacon’s Armchair has just been released from an extended stay at a psychiatric hospital and now has only one objective: to shut himself away in his apartment and contemplate the best way to restart his life. But his obsession with Cathie, a young woman he met during his convalescence, drives him out of his bedroom one night in search of a telephone—which leads him two floors below into the apartment of his morbidly obese neighbor, Sauvage. Sauvage is a translator overwhelmed by his current project, The Dictionary of Rare and Incurable Diseases, and by the inherent difficulties of his profession. The narrator begins paying regular visits to his mysterious neighbor, and the two isolated men develop a bizarre relationship dominated by fear, jealousy, and mutual fascination. A hypnotic and philosophically dense novel, Francis Bacon’s Armchair deftly weaves between explorations of loneliness, language, and obsession.

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