Author

Publication

2018 - , New York (State)

Language

English

Word Count

49,250 words, Guess

Page Count

197 pages

Identifiers

  • ISBN-100811227820
  • ISBN-139780811227827
  • Library of Congress Control Number2017055363
  • OCLC Control Number1014006639
  • Better World Books9780811227827
and 1 more

Classifications

  • DDC813/.54
  • LCCPS3554.E92945 A6 2018
  • LCCPS3554.E92945A6 2018

Description

For sheer unpredictable brilliance, Gogol may come to mind, but no author alive today takes a reader as far as Helen DeWitt into the funniest, most yonder dimensions of possibility. Her jumping-off points might be statistics, romance, the art world's piranha tank, games of chance and games of skill, the travails of publishing, or success. "Look," a character begins to explain, laying out some gambit reasonably enough, even if facing a world of boomeranging counterfactuals, situations spinning out to their utmost logical extremes, and Rube Goldberg-like moving parts, where things prove "more complicated than they had first appeared" and "at 3 a.m. the circumstances seem to attenuate." In various ways, each tale carries DeWitt's signature poker-face lament regarding the near-impossibility of the life of the mind when one is made to pay to have the time for it, in a world so sadly "taken up with all sorts of paraphernalia superfluous, not to say impedimental, to ratiocination."

Subjects

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