City

Alessandro Baricco

Paperback

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The author of the international bestseller Silk now delivers a ravishing and wildly inventive novel about friendship, genius and its discontents, and the redemptive power of narrative. Somewhere in America lives a brilliant boy named Gould, an intellectual guided missile aimed at the Nobel Prize. His only companions are an imaginary giant and an imaginary mute. Improbably--and yet with impeccable logic--he falls into the care of Shatzy Shell, a young woman whose life up till that point has been equally devoid of human connection .

Theirs is a relationship of stories and of stories within stories: of Gould's evolving saga of an underdog boxer and the violent Western that Shatzy has been dictating into a tape recorder since the age of six. Out of these stories, Alessandro Baricco creates a masterpiece of metaphysical pulp fiction that recalls both Scheherazade and Italo Calvino. By turns exhilarating and deeply moving, City is irresistible.

Book Details

Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publish Date: Jun 17th, 2003
Pages: 336
Language: English
Edition: undefined - undefined
Dimensions: 8.06in - 5.26in - 0.77in - 0.52lb
EAN: 9780375725487
Categories: • Literary

About the Author

Alessandro Baricco was born in Turin in 1958. The author of three previous novels, he has won the Prix Médicis étranger in France and the Selezione Campiello, Viareggio, and Palazzo del Bosco prizes in Italy. His third novel, Silk, became an immediate best-seller in Italy and has been translated into twenty-seven languages. It is the basis of a forthcoming opera by André Previn and a film to be produced by Miramax.

Praise for this book

"Baricco has inventiveness in spades, and his freaks have the capacity to chill the blood or warm the heart." -- Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Filled with wild invention and lyrical prose . . . Conventional characters and superheroes alike behave with the wild abandon we have come to recognize in the novels of Thomas Pynchon, Don De Lillo and Robert Coover. City is simultaneously hilarious and profoundly sad." -- The Washington Post Book World

"An imaginative, surprisingly poignant Italian reinvention of what has become a staple of American teen fiction: the saga of marginalized members of society who find comfort in each other."-- Booklist

"Along with flashes of love it reveals for old-fashioned storytelling, City boldly displays its futurist credentials...Baricco's narrative virtuosity continues to astonish." --The Independent (London)