Purchase
Train Dreams, September 2011
Hardcover
Tree of Smoke, September 2007
Hardcover
Fiskadoro, March 2003
Paperback
Shoppers, June 2002
Paperback
Angels, May 2002
Paperback
Seek, March 2002
Paperback
Resuscitation of a Hanged Man, July 2001
Paperback
The Name of the World, May 2001
Paperback
Already Dead, June 1998
Paperback
The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly, June 1996
Paperback
The Stars at Noon, May 1995
Paperback
Jesus' Son: Stories, December 1993
Paperback
Harper Perennial
May 2001
On Sale: May 1, 2001
Featuring: Michael Reed
144 pages ISBN: 0060929650 EAN: 9780060929657 Paperback
Add to Wish List
Fiction
The acclaimed author of Jesus' Son and Already
Dead returns with a beautiful, haunting, and darkly
comic novel. The Name of the World is a mesmerizing
portrait of a professor at a Midwestern university who has
been patient in his grief after an accident takes the lives
of his wife and child and has permitted that grief to
enlarge him. Michael Reed is living a posthumous life.
In spite of outward appearances -- he holds a respectable
university teaching position; he is an articulate and
attractive addition to local social life -- he's a dead man
walking. Nothing can touch Reed, nothing can move him,
although he observes with a mordant clarity the lives
whirling vigorously around him. Of his recent bereavement,
nearly four years earlier, he observes, "I'm speaking as I'd
speak of a change in the earth's climate, or the recent
war." Facing the unwelcome end of his temporary stint
at the university, Reed finds himself forced "to act like
somebody who cares what happens to him. " Tentatively he
begins to let himself make contact with a host of characters
in this small academic town, souls who seem to have in
common a tentativeness of their own. In this atmosphere
characterized, as he says, "by cynicism, occasional
brilliance, and small, polite terror," he manages, against
all his expectations, to find people to light his way
through his private labyrinth. Elegant and incisively
observed, The Name of the World is Johnson at his
best: poignant yet unsentimental, replete with the visionary
imaginative detail for which his work is known. Here is a
tour de force by one of the most astonishing writers at work
today.
Comments
No comments posted.
Registered users may leave comments.
Log in or register now!
|