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After Hurricane Sandy, Nick Fowler, a writer, stranded alone in a Manhattan apartment without power, begins to contemplate disaster. Months later, at an artist residency in upstate New York, Nick finds his subject in disaster itself and the communities shaped by it, where crisis animates both hope and denial, unacknowledged pasts and potential futures. As he travels to Los Angeles and London on assignment, Nick discovers that outsiders¿their lives and histories disturbed by sex, loss, and bad weather¿are often better understood by what they have hidden from the world than what they have revealed.
After Hurricane Sandy, Nick Fowler, a writer, stranded alone in a Manhattan apartment without power, begins to contemplate disaster. Months later, at an artist residency in upstate New York, Nick finds his subject in disaster itself and the communities shaped by it, where crisis animates both hope and denial, unacknowledged pasts and potential futures. As he travels to Los Angeles and London on assignment, Nick discovers that outsiders¿their lives and histories disturbed by sex, loss, and bad weather¿are often better understood by what they have hidden from the world than what they have revealed.
Galleys sent to print magazines in advance of publication, finished book sent to list of reviewers created in collaboration with the author, twitter, instagram, Nightboat blog and catalog, NYC and Bay Area book launches.
Andrew Durbin is a poet, novelist, editor, and critic. He is the author of Mature Themes (2014), MacArthur Park (2017), and the forthcoming Rereading Pettibon. His fiction, criticism, and poetry have appeared in Artforum, BOMB, Boston Review, Frieze, Mousse, Triple Canopy, and elsewhere. He co-edits the independent publisher Wonder and lives in New York.
"Andrew Durbin writes prose with narcoleptic tendencies, his
sentences like sleepers suddenly jerking awake. In his new novel,
MacArthur Park, Durbin’s protagonist Nick Fowler, a young poet who
occasionally writes about art and is also working on a book, is
trying to recall the details of a hookup. He knows he made out with
a boy to the backdrop of a rising sun; it might have been snowing.
Durbin writes, “All winter I kept thinking that it was snowing,
though it was often too warm to stick or seemingly too cold to
snow, and so the silver-gray clouds, like the underbellies of fish,
kept their close, mindful distance, always refusing to break out of
their steady overhead stream into an event. The weather did not
like to make itself understood.” But Durbin does. His character’s
interiors are well-lit, even during blackouts."—Thora Siemson,
Lithub
"Andrew Durbin's MacArthur Park flows and revels in the
contemporary current. It's wry, dramatic, cool, knowing, funny,
sobering, a novel of unsparing consciousness that spars with the
news and effects of uncontrollable weather. Durbin registers the
temperature of our nights and days, with perfect pitch
conversations and commentaries on pop culture, utopian collectives,
the art world, politics, sex, emotions… Everywhere, Nick acutely
observes the natural world of startling sunsets and lush
landscapes, and always smells the coffee. Andrew Durbin's first
novel is as surprising as it is tender. It's a beautiful
work."—Lynne Tillman
"One of the few younger writers brazen enough to take up Gary
Indiana's velvet-lined gauntlet, Andrew Durbin steals from the
master's toolbox only to construct something entirely his own,
personal or, rather, "personal." Shedding poetry at just the right
moment, he understands that the Weather Channel now delivers the
news that stays news. The most fraught meteorology occurs when
those fronts called the intellect and the heart collide."—Bruce
Hainley
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