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From the award-winning author of Bubblegum and The Instructions, a daring new novel about the absurdity, the humor, and the tragedy of survivorship. "Adam Levin is one of our wildest writers and our funniest." –George Saunders, bestselling, award-winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo A one-in-ten-billion natural disaster devastates Chicago. A Jewish comedian, his most devoted fan, and the city’s mayor must struggle to move forward while the world—quite literally—caves beneath their feet. With this polyphonic tale of Chicago-style politics and political correctness, stand-up comedy and Jewish identity, celebrity, drugs, and animal psychology, Levin has constructed a monument to laughter, love, art, and resilience in an age of spectacular loss. *Includes a downloadable PDF of images from the book
From the award-winning author of Bubblegum and The Instructions, a daring new novel about the absurdity, the humor, and the tragedy of survivorship. "Adam Levin is one of our wildest writers and our funniest." –George Saunders, bestselling, award-winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo A one-in-ten-billion natural disaster devastates Chicago. A Jewish comedian, his most devoted fan, and the city’s mayor must struggle to move forward while the world—quite literally—caves beneath their feet. With this polyphonic tale of Chicago-style politics and political correctness, stand-up comedy and Jewish identity, celebrity, drugs, and animal psychology, Levin has constructed a monument to laughter, love, art, and resilience in an age of spectacular loss. *Includes a downloadable PDF of images from the book
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
Excerpts-
From the cover
Carrying Pictures of Chairman Mao
None of this happened. None of it will. The events I’ll describe, most of which will be set in the early twenty-twenties, will all be described in the late twenty-teens. The characters who those events will affect do not exist outside these pages, not even those characters who’ll strongly resemble certain people I know, and not even in those cases where the characters resembling people I know will have the same names as the people they’ll resemble. It’ll all be made up. I’m making it up.
No one I’ve been close with has ever died. I’ve met a couple Schutzes, but never an Apter. Not a single Gladman. I have never had more than $106,019.00. I have usually had less than $4,000.00. Today—February 2, 2018—I have a little less than $30,000. The seventeenth of November, 2021, will not fall on a Sunday, but a Wednesday. The Rainbo Club doesn’t serve Corona. Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds wasn’t released till 2009. The Grant Park Lollapalooza Festival never takes place before the end of July. I have never had tenure or nieces or neph- ews. I’ve known comedic actors, but none of them were stand-ups. My dealings with mayors have not been extensive.
Once, at a Chicago Public Library ceremony honoring the author Don DeLillo, my wife shook the four-and-two-thirds-fingered hand of Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who, later that evening, in his speech to those gathered, twice pronounced DeLillo like this: Duh-lee-lee-yo.
Two decades–plus prior, when I was fourteen years old, summer- jobbing downtown at my father’s insurance firm, I spotted the city’s second Mayor Richard Daley, i.e. Richard M., a quarter block away. I was out on my lunch break. He was walking up Wacker with a couple other men, and he appeared so very squat and red-faced that I, who had started eating acid earlier that year, thought that maybe I was finally having a flashback, and so I approached him to get a closer look. I got closer than I’d meant to. I wasn’t, it turned out, having a flashback.
I’ve never had a flashback. I no longer think that flashbacks are real. The only people who ever report having flashbacks are people who have had bad trips on acid. Bad trips are panic attacks one has while on acid. If someone is on acid the first time they suffer a panic attack, they don’t think, “I am hav- ing a panic attack,” but rather, “I am having a bad trip.” And then, the next time they suffer a panic attack, they think, “This is kind of like that bad trip I had. I am having a flashback,” and that’s what they tell people about their panic attack: “I had a flashback.” And people believe them. And the ones who like acid but who haven’t ever had a bad trip on acid imagine that a flashback will not feel like a panic attack, but like whatever being high on acid had felt like to them— like some kind of fun. So they imagine a flashback must be some kind of fun. But they never have flashbacks. There’s no such thing.
I have had bad trips, which is to say that I have had panic attacks while high on acid. But I didn’t have my first panic attack while not high on acid until I was nearly thirty years old, by which point I’d long since quit taking acid, and had long since worked (and, not so long after that, quit working) as a psychotherapist. As a psychotherapist, I worked with a number of clients with anxiety disorders, which is to say a number of clients who suffered...
About the Author-
ADAM LEVIN is the author of Bubblegum, The Instructions, and Hot Pink. His writing has appeared in numerous publications, including The New Yorker, McSweeney’s, and Playboy. He has been a New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award winner, a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, and a National Jewish Book Award finalist. A longtime Chicagoan, Levin currently lives in Gainesville, Florida.
Reviews-
June 6, 2022 In Levin’s exhausting metafictional latest, a sinkhole opens under Chicago and swallows up big swaths of the city. Comedian and novelist Solly Gladman stays home with hemorrhoids while his family takes a trip to the museum, then disappear in the sinkhole, leaving Gladman to drown in whiskey, Xanax, and regret. Gladman’s “foil,” Apter Schutz, who made big profits off a hilarious scheme involving desk calendars meant to parody white nationalists, idolizes Gladman. After Apter is recruited to work for the mayor, who wants to create “Mount Chicago,” a memorial that will be a “less depressing Auschwitz,” the mayor tasks Apter with putting together “Day Zero,” a music festival to aid the city’s recovery. Apter finally gets the chance of an encounter with Gladman when he is tasked with finding and convincing him to perform. Unfortunately, Levin undercuts the otherwise satisfying sociopolitical comedy with frustrating interjections about his struggles to write this novel and sell his previous one, his wife’s uncertainty about whether Apter or Gladman is supposed to be Levin, and many other asides that read like missives to creative writing students or nod to the difficulties of this latest project. As the frustrated reader will find, acknowledging a problem is not equivalent to solving it.
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