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About Face - A Novel
William Giraldi
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R523
R445
Discovery Miles 4 450
Save R78 (15%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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Evoking such classics as Elmer Gantry and The Day of the Locust,
William Giraldi’s About Face boldly transfers the perennial
literary themes of celebrity, ambition, and obsession to
twenty-first-century Boston. There we meet Val Face, a charismatic
self-help guru who captivates multitudes with his uncanny ability
to heal adherents using only the power of his words, the mysterious
touch of his hands, and the transcendent beauty of his face.
Assigned to write a profile of Val Face during his much-hyped New
England tour, thirty-year-old impoverished journalist Seger Jovi
pens a brutal hatchet job. But Seger, at once curious and
incredulous, is soon sucked into the mystic’s vortex of fame,
becoming a devotee himself as he contends with the machinations and
absurdities of Face’s many protectors, from beefcake bodyguards
to helicoptering handlers to Face’s unwavering spouse, Nimble. At
first unwilling to sacrifice his principles to fulfill his own
ambition and rise from privation, then touched by Face’s
unexpected humanity, Seger oscillates between acting as Face’s
cynical foil and becoming his unlikely ally. Just as the exalted
guru appears to be reaching the apex of his powers, danger
threatens from the periphery in the form of an obsessive stalker
who wants Face dead. To curb this stalker before he can do harm,
Face’s security team enlists the aid of Jackie Jaworski, an
ex-Marine and resourceful Boston detective who moonlights as a
novelist of thrillers. And so About Face, building to a denouement
that will astonish readers, takes us into the convergence of
violence and fame that has come to define so much of American
popular culture over the last half-century. With its indelible
array of characters, hypnotic pacing, and shocking conclusion—and
“a mesmerizing prose style that is downright pyrotechnic in its
brilliance” (Andre Dubus III)—About Face is a novel in the
grand tradition that dances along the tenuous line between the
sacred and the profane.
Echoing a narrative line that includes Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph
Heller, William Giraldi's Busy Monsters has been hailed as one of
the most exciting fiction debuts in years. Penned with a linguistic
bravado that explores the diaphanous line between fiction and fact,
this "very funny, very inventive debut novel" (The New Yorker) has
at last revived the great American picaresque tradition.
The Hero's Body is a memoir of what it means to be a man in modern
America. At just forty-seven years old, William Giraldi's father
was killed in a horrific motorcycle accident. Writing here with
searing honesty about grief, obsession, shame and identity, he
looks back on three generations of men from the blue-collar town of
Manville, New Jersey, and tells their stories in tandem: the
speed-crazed cult of his father's 'superbikes', each Sunday spent
racing fate along the winding back roads of Pennsylvania; the
trauma of a son's ultimate loss, and William's attempts to rebuild
a self in the manliest costume he knew. For a teen consumed by
hardcore bodybuilding, pumping iron was so much more than a
sport-it was a hallowed lifeline for a bookish tenth-grader, a way
to forge himself a spot amongst his family's imperious patriarchs.
A work of lasting literary beauty, lauded by the New Yorker for its
'unrelenting, perfectly paced prose', The Hero's Body is a tale of
the working-class male, the codes of machismo and the unspoken bond
between father and son.
Written with "force and precision and grace" (John Wilwol, New York
Times Book Review) Hold the Dark is a "taut and unforgettable
journey into the heart of darkness" (Dennis Lehane). At the start
of another pitiless winter, wolves have taken three children from
the remote Alaskan village of Keelut, including the six-year-old
son of Medora and Vernon Slone. Wolf expert Russell Core is called
in to investigate these killings and discovers an unholy truth
harbored by Medora before she disappears. When her husband returns
home to discover his boy dead and his wife missing, he begins a
maniacal pursuit that cuts a bloody swath across the frozen
landscape. With the help of a local police detective, Core attempts
to find Medora before her husband does, setting in motion a deadly
chain of events in this "chilling, mysterious, and completely
engaging novel" (Tim O'Brien) that marks the arrival of a major
American writer.
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