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An exuberant modern-day picaresque about the cost of love-struck obsession and the inevitable monsters of every human heart.
Memoirist of mediocre fame, Charles Homar has a problem: his bride-to-be, Gillian Lee, has nixed their nuptials and fled to the high seas in search of a legendary giant squid, unleashing an unholy heart wreck upon him. In a hell-bent effort to prove his mettle as an American male and win back Gillian's affections, Charlie crisscrosses the nation seeking counsel, confronting creatures both mythic and real - Bigfoot on the Canadian border, space aliens in Seattle, a professional bodybuilder with Asiatic sex slaves in suburban New Jersey, the demons dancing a rumba inside his own heart - and then writing about his travails every week for a popular slick magazine. Echoing a narrative tradition that includes Don Quixote and Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions, William Giraldi's debut novel is a love story of linguistic bravado that explores American excess, the diaphanous line between fiction and fact, and what desperate men and women will do to one another.
"Starred Review. Riotous... filled with offbeat characters, seen through a perfectly skewed worldview, and related in an idiosyncratic voice." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. [H]ere we have a seriocomic picaresque that references everything from The Odyssey to medieval romances to Don Quixote and Moby-Dick. A brilliant first novel..." - Library Journal
"William Giraldi's Busy Monsters is rammed with life. It has more than promise. A kind of elegiac intensity, remarkable for so young a man, pervades its harmonies." - Harold Bloom, American author and literary critic
"Take the amped-up lyrical braggadocio of the American South and join it to a sly, at times Nabokovian celebration of psychological obsession. Add a pinch of O'Connor, a dash of Hannah, heat with an imagination reared in both the canon and its rock & roll antipodes. Busy Monsters is an unforgettable achievement by one of our most important young chroniclers of anguish and bliss." - Sven Birkerts, author of The Gutenberg Elegies and My Sky Blue Trades: Growing Up Counter in a Contrary Time
"Busy Monsters is superb. Comic writing of the first rank and prose every serious writer should envy for its anarchic ingenuity." - Walter Kirn, author of Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachiever
This information about Busy Monsters 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.
William Giraldi's work has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, The Georgia Review, The Believer, The Kenyon Review, and Poets & Writers. A senior editor at AGNI, he teaches in the Arts & Sciences Writing Program at Boston University. Visit him online at www.busymonsters.com.
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