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Published Sep 2014
176 pages
Genre: Short Stories
Publication Information
Nothing is simple for the men and women in Donald Antrim's stories. As they do the things we all do - bum a cigarette at a party, stroll with a girlfriend down Madison Avenue, take a kid to the zoo - they're confronted with their own uncooperative selves. These artists, writers, lawyers, teachers, and actors make fools of themselves, spiral out of control, have delusions of grandeur, despair, and find it hard to imagine a future. They talk, they listen, they hope, they dream. They look for communion in a city, both beautiful and menacing, which can promise so much and yield so little. But they are hungry for life. They want to love and be loved.
These stories, all published in The New Yorker over the last fifteen years, make it clear that Antrim is one of America's most important writers. His work has been praised by his significant contemporaries, including Jonathan Franzen, Thomas Pynchon, Jeffrey Eugenides, and George Saunders, who described The Verificationist as "one of the most pleasure-giving, funny, perverse, complicated, addictive novels of the last twenty years." And here is Antrim's best book yet: the story collection that reveals him as a master of the form.
"Starred Review. A collection of great depth to be read, reread, and above all, relished." - Publishers Weekly
"A deceptively spiky set of meditations on romantic failure." - Kirkus
This information about The Emerald Light in the Air 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.
Donald Antrim is the author of the novels Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World, The Hundred Brothers, and The Verificationist, as well as a memoir, The Afterlife. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and an associate professor in the writing program at Columbia University. He is a 2013 MacArthur Fellow.
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