Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
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Fiction & Related items

ISLAND OF THE MAD

Laurie Sheck

A daring new novel by a celebrated poet and novelist.

Orphaned and hunchbacked since childhood, Ambrose has lived a reclusive life until one day he’s confronted with an odd request: that he travel to Venice in search of a lost notebook. His search eventually leads him through the Venetian Lagoon to the island of San Servolo, also known as the Island of the Mad, where rummaging through a drawer in the old hospital, he discovers a notebook containing the letters and notes of two of the island’s former inhabitants— a woman suffering from a rare genetic illness which causes the afflicted to die of sleeplessness, and a man who experiences epileptic seizures. As the sleepless woman’s eyesight fails, she wants only one thing—that her epileptic friend read to her from Dostojewski’s great novel, The Idiot, a book she loves but can no longer read. As Ambrose tells his tale, everything he has ever known or thought is called into question.

Laure Sheck's A Monster's Notes (Knopf 2012) was long-listed for the Dublin Impac International Fiction Prize. Her five books of poems (all Knopf) include Captivity and the Willow Grove, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Available products
Book Published 2016-12-01 by Counterpoint
Book Published 2016-12-01 by Counterpoint

Comments

The entire time, [the book] took my breath away...With a simple sentence, Sheck brings into sharp relief concepts that I've never thought to question or contemplate...Island of the Mad is gorgeously written and full of moments of deep introspection and speculation. Dark, mysterious, poetic and utterly confounding. To read it is to feel one is attempting to swim through muddied waters - muddied waters that contain necessary truths. Waters that, once you emerge from the other side, you are grateful for having been allowed entrance into them.

Laurie Sheck is a thrilling, original writer whose work has only gotten more ambitious and layered with each successive book. Her latest project, an unfolding trilogy, was launched by the remarkable and much-praised A Monster’s Notes, a hybrid, ramifying reckoning with Frankenstein, romanticism, and much else. Her current book, Island of the Mad, brings us to yet another stunning, unpredictable zone. An ambitious, significant work is unfolding before us: volume three, invoking the filmmaker R. W. Fassbinder, will conclude this writer’s unusual orchestration of philosophical inquiry, narrative, archival intuition, and poetic brio.

[P]oet and poetic novelist Sheck draws on classic works [...]to create an exquisitely intricate and moving literary pastiche...In concise, haunting, inquisitive, and incantatory passages, Sheck imaginatively and compassionately explores the mysteries of the body and mind, of brokenness and aloneness, while celebrating language as a lifeline across pain, time, and space.

“Plunges into language like a silken dagger, removing us to plague years and haunted mysteries that might just remind us of contemporary lives and dreams. An amazing, exhilarating read that creates its own maze and accompanies the reader deeper and deeper into a miraculous world.”

“Laurie Sheck is one of the most gifted and original writers at work today; I don’t know of another who so deftly combines the poet’s lyricism, the novelist’s grasp of character and suspense, and the scholar’s love of historical detail. Her previous and path-breaking book, A Monster’s Notes, was unlike anything I’d ever read, haunting and exhilarating. Her latest, the dream-like and mysterious Island of the Mad, is, if anything, even more powerful and moving—and is a book that will be treasured and taught for many years to come.”

“Laurie Sheck is a true American original, andIsland of the Madis a remarkable hybrid text that at once pushes the boundaries of literary fiction and poetry andspeaks to the reader with tremendous insight and compassion about human suffering and survival. At once wise and thrilling, beautiful and challenging, mysterious and inviting, Sheck’s work cuts to the heart of all that is most challenging and wondrous about human experience. To readIsland of the Mad is to have “felt the world touch” us – as the narrator puts it – “with its strange, unpredictable hand.” And what else could we want of literature but this?”

What the violent suffering in Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot taught the author Laurie Sheck about finding inspiration in torment and illness Read more...

Nothing short of brilliant. Its hybrid form hovers between poetry and fiction; grounded in a deep understanding of the past it is also perfectly contemporary in its idioms and concerns This is ambitious, cutting edge work, both intimate and daringly literary at once. Laurie Sheck is an American Original.

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“Sheck returns with a gorgeously written work that layers together strands of history in one bravura act… A dizzyingly inventive work that reveals a strong sense of human connectedness; highly recommended for anyone who doesn’t want just plot.”

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“Reads like a lucid dream… Sheck pulls readers through the time-worm canals of Venice on a literary romp that will please fans of the historical and the fantastic alike."

Best of Indie Fall Fiction

“Compelling, mysterious and hard to shake…utterly one of a kind.”

“A poetic meditation on Russian literature, bubonic plague, Venice, and the multiverse.”