Lurid & Cute
Author(s): Adam Thirlwell
This yarn takes place in the suburbs of a giant city. In Brasilia they're coming off their night shift, in Tokyo they're having their first whisky sours - that's what's happening elsewhere in the world when our hero wakes up. Together with his wife and dog, he lives at home with his parents. He has had the good education and, until recently, the good job. In other words, the juggernaut of meaning was not parked heavily on our hero's lawn. But then the lurid overtakes him - and whether this lurid tone is caused by our hero's new unemployment, or his feelings for a girl who is not his wife, or the return of his old friend Hiro, it's hard to say. What's definite is that a chain of events begins that feels to those inside it, narcotic and neurotic, like one long and terrible descent - complete with lies, deciet, and chicanery; one orgy, one brothel, and a series of firearms disputes. While if you start to notice minute doubles and repeats, or wonder if what you took as some trick of perspective might in fact be a kink of reality, perhaps that shouldn't be so much of a surprise...For very possibly this suburban noir as the story of a woebegone and global generation - and our hero, the sweetest narrator in world literature, may well also be the most fearsome.
General Information
- :
- : Vintage
- : Vintage
- : 01 December 2015
- : 198mm X 129mm
- : United Kingdom
- : books
Other Specifications
- : Adam Thirlwell
- : Paperback
- : 368
More About The Product
An extravaganza of suburban noir - complete with one orgy, one brothel, and a series of firearms disputes - from Adam Thirlwell, twice selected as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists.
"Reads like a collaboration between Kundera and Murakami to adapt SJ Watson's Before I Go To Sleep or Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl into post-modernist fiction" Guardian "Lurid & Cute is a simple story of mayhem and ennui, almost a caper, but told with such satisfying ironies and verbal dexterity that everything is technicolor again. So alive, so inventive, so very good." -- Joshua Ferris, author of 'To Rise Again at a Decent Hour' "It's a seductive slice of suburban noir" -- Sebastian Shakespeare Tatler "Lurid & Cute is strong enough to make admirers out of detractors" -- Malcolm Forbes National "Lurid & Cute, which begins as...an exercise in pure style, also reveals itself as a very earnest critique of the morals of a pampered generation" -- Adam Kirsch Atlantic
Adam Thirlwell is the author of two novels, Politics and The Escape; a novella, Kapow!; and a project including an essay-book - which won a Somerset Maugham Award - and a compendium of translations edited for McSweeney's. His work is translated into thirty languages. He has twice been selected as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists.