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Published Jan 2014
224 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
This brilliant new novel by an American master, the author of Ragtime, The Book of Daniel, Billy Bathgate, and The March, takes us on a radical trip into the mind of a man who, more than once in his life, has been the inadvertent agent of disaster.
Speaking from an unknown place and to an unknown interlocutor, Andrew is thinking, Andrew is talking, Andrew is telling the story of his life, his loves, and the tragedies that have led him to this place and point in time. And as he confesses, peeling back the layers of his strange story, we are led to question what we know about truth and memory, brain and mind, personality and fate, about one another and ourselves. Written with psychological depth and great lyrical precision, this suspenseful and groundbreaking novel delivers a voice for our times - funny, probing, skeptical, mischievous, profound. Andrew's Brain is a surprising turn and a singular achievement in the canon of a writer whose prose has the power to create its own landscape, and whose great topic, in the words of Don DeLillo, is "the reach of American possibility, in which plain lives take on the cadences of history."
"Starred Review. Doctorow deftly captures the complex but beautiful vagaries of life in clean, simple language." - Library Journal
"Despite their expansive themes and culturally significant imagery, Andrew's revelations are little more than clues to an amusing, if tedious, puzzle." - Publishers Weekly
"Brilliant in parts but unsatisfying as a whole." - Kirkus
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Named for Edgar Allan Poe, Edgar Lawrence Doctorow occupies a central position in the history of American literature. On a shortlist that might also include Philip Roth, Toni Morrison, John Updike, Saul Bellow, and Don DeLillo, E. L. Doctorow is generally considered to be among the most talented, ambitious, and admired novelists of the second half of the twentieth century. Long celebrated for his vivid evocations of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American life (particularly New York life), Doctorow has received the National Book Award, two National Book Critics Circle Awards, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Edith Wharton Citation for Fiction, the William Dean Howell Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the presidentially conferred National Humanities Medal.
Doctorow was...
... Full Biography
Link to E.L. Doctorow's Website
Name Pronunciation
E.L. Doctorow: DAHK-tuh-row (emphasis on the first syllable. Russian for 'son of a doctor')
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