Whistlejacket

Paperback
Price: $12.95 $10.36 Save $2.59 (20%)

While investigating his mentor's life and death, Michael, a voyeuristic fashion photographer, travels through a Dionysian landscape where sex is daydream, women and horses share the same erotic power, and perversity is the rule. In his search, Michael uses photographs and paintings to visualize the past and thereby expose a family's decadent legacy of sex, lies, and betrayal.

An inventive mix of biography, history, erotica, and classic whodunit, Whistlejacket is John Hawkes at his best as he blurs the distinction between death and desire, image and language, art and morality.

Details

ISBN-10 1-56478-176-3

ISBN-13 9781564781765

Publication Date Sep 1997

Nb of pages 208

Dimensions 5.5 x 8.5 in.

Onix

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Summary

Reviews

Press Reviews

New York Times

Brilliantly sustained . . . Whistlejacket maintains John Hawkes's position as the most consistently interesting writer at work in the United States today.

Chicago Tribune

Whistlejacket is about appearance, and rendering it, and Hawkes is a terrific renderer of the colors, angles and tangles of stuff . . . splendid.

Baltimore Sun

A carefully composed, stunningly detailed piece of writing . . . Whistlejacket is a work of fierce beauty that should further enhance the reputation of both artist and author.

San Diego Tribune

If you want to explore, if you are a lover of the unknown, John Hawkes is for you . . . The only way to enjoy Whistlejacket is to give up the need to control and let the book control you.

Quotations

A terrifying fox hunt that resembles Picasso's 'Guernica,' a funeral that only Francis Bacon could paint, dentistry as imagined by Hieronymus Bosch—these are just a few of the disquieting pleasures

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-Edmund White

From the first, John Hawkes's prose has sounded what Henry James would have said was 'the right note' . . . His lines are alive as few in our literature.

-William H. Gass

A splendid achievement . . . Whistlejacket is every bit as idiosyncratic and remarkable as Blood Oranges or The Lime Twig or Virginie, which is saying a great deal. John Hawkes is an American master, and each book reveals new colors and depths in his work.

-Donald Barthelme

There is an arresting image in John Hawkes's 1961 novel The Lime Twig of a racehorse being lifted out of a barge at night with boom and harness: the silvery horse pawing the air as an

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-Robert Coover

Outrageous situations and unforgettable scenes refracted through a lens of rhetoric as beautiful as anything I know of in contemporary fiction.

-John Barth

A magnificent, unforgettable book full of sensual delight and prose virtuosities . . . Whistlejacket is perhaps the finest of Hawkes's hymns to the flesh.

-Paul West

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Genres : Fiction : United States and Canada
Countries : United States of America

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