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THE INTERROGATIVE MOOD

Padgett Powell

The Interrogative Mood is a wildly inventive, jazzy meditation on life and language by the novelist that Ian Frazier hails as "one of the best writers in America, and one of the funniest, too."
A novel composed entirely of questions, it is perhaps the most audacious literary high-wire act since Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine or David Foster Wallace's stories; a playful and profound book that, as Jonathan Safran Foer says, "will sear the unlucky volumes shelved on either side of it. How it doesn't, itself, combust in flames is a mystery to me." Padgett Powell is the author of six novels, including The Interrogative Mood and Edisto, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and three collections of stories. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker , Harper's , and The Paris Review, as well as in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Sports Writing. He has received a Whiting Award, the Rome Fellowship in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Powell lives in Gainesville, Florida.
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Published 2009-01-01 by Ecco/ HarperCollins

Comments

[A] peculiar and mind-popping experience... Most novels take us away from ourselves, into the lives and minds of other people. The Interrogative Mood goes boldly in the other direction - and really, wouldn't you like to talk about yourself?

Hypnotic... Jazzy meditations that wrestle with life's important questions.

If Duchamp or maybe Magritte wrote a novel (and maybe they did. Did they?) it might look something like this remarkable little book of Padgett Powell's.