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by Will Chancellor
Owen Burr, a towering athlete at Stanford University, son of renowned classicist Professor Joseph Burr, was destined to compete in the Athens Olympic Games of 2004. But in his final match at Stanford, he is blinded in one eye. The wound shatters his identity and any prospects he had as an athlete.
Determined to make a new name for himself, Owen flees the country and lands in Berlin, where he meets a group of wildly successful artists living in the Teutonic equivalent of Warhol's Factory. An irresistible sight - nearly seven-feet-tall, wearing an eye patch and a corduroy suit - Owen is quickly welcomed by the group's leader, who schemes to appropriate Owen's image and sell the results at Art Basel. With his warped and tortured image on the auction block, Owen seeks revenge.
Professor Burr has never been the father he wants to be. Owen's disappearance triggers a call to action. He dusts off his more speculative theory, Liminalism, to embark on a speaking tour, pushing theory to its radical extreme - at his own peril and with Jean Baudrillard's help - in order to send up flares for his son in Athens, Berlin, and Iceland.
A compulsively readable novel of ideas, action, and intrigue, A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall offers a persuasive vision of personal agency, art, family, and the narratives we build for ourselves.
"Starred Review. Bracingly rich...the author maintains an almost thriller-like pace while taking well-aimed shots at academic and art-market fads and helping two lost souls through essential transformations." - Kirkus
"Chancellor's debut is a twisting, globe-trotting affair that unfortunately suffers from poor pacing and frequently dwells on the mundane. The result is a mixed bag, unsure of its own identity, like many of the book's characters." - Publishers Weekly
"Owen's observations of his paramour, and a world he struggles to feel at home in, can be quite moving" - Booklist
"Wry, smart, tender, huge-hearted, Will Chancellor strides onto the page in the spirit of Bellow with writing poised like poetry. A dauntless debut." - Paul Lynch
"Owen Burr is a character unlike any you're likely to meet in contemporary literature. Watching him move through the world, and negotiate with his own dreams, is both powerful and revelatory." - Daniel Alarcón
"Will Chancellor has an electrifying, deeply original voice, and his book is so full of depth and heart that it's impossible to put down." - Molly Antopol, author of The UnAmericans
This information about A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall 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.
Will Chancellor grew up in Hawaii and Texas and lives in New York City. This is his first novel.
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