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Published Apr 2011
304 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
On Midsummer Eve 2008, three people, each on the run from a failed relationship, become trapped in San Francisco's Buena Vista Park, the secret home of Titania, Oberon, and their court. On this night, something awful is happening in the faerie kingdom: in a fit of sadness over the end of her marriage, which broke up in the wake of the death of her adopted son, Titania has set loose an ancient menace, and the chaos that ensues will threaten the lives of immortals and mortals alike.
Selected by The New Yorker as one the best young writers in America, Adrian has created a singularly playful, heartbreaking, and humorous novel - a story that charts the borders between reality and dreams, love and magic, and mortality and immortality.
"The book contains flashes of what makes this writer great, but he has better work in him." - Publishers Weekly
"Inventive and scarily beautiful, this could wipe out casual readers, but it is an extraordinary novel." - Library Journal
"In his previous work, Adrian did a better job of balancing loss and death with fantasy and the supernatural. [In The Great Night] there is careful patterning but no unifying sensibility." - Kirkus Reviews
"The Great Night - by turns brilliant, cruel, tenderhearted, visionary, poetic, and profane - is Adrian's ambitious attempt to fetch from his own imagination what Shakespeare referred to as 'jewels from the deep.'" - Elle Magazine
This information about The Great Night was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Chris Adrian was born in Washington, D.C. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he received his MD from East Virginia Medical School. "Every Night for a Thousand Years", the New Yorker story from which this novel stemmed, was anthologized in Best American Short Stories 1998.. His fiction has also appeared in The Paris Review, Zoetrope, Ploughshares, and Story.
Mr. Adrian is Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Columbia University Medical Center.
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