| Vendor | |
|---|---|
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Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher |
| Original language | |
| English | |
| Categories | |
| Weblink | |
| http://thejasonporter.com/ | |
WHY ARE YOU SO SAD?
Humorous novel about a melancholic pictographer at a company resembling Ikea, who hypothesizes that the human race has fallen into a species-wide depression, and decides to get to the bottom of it.
Have we all sunken into a species-wide bout of clinical depression? In Jason Porter’s hilarious and poignant debut novel, Why Are You So Sad?, readers are introduced to Ray, a senior pictographer at LokiLoki. Ray feels disengaged from life, and comes to believe that the people around him are products of a grieving planet. He composes a survey, asking his motley assortment of colleagues questions like: “Are you who you want to be?”, “If you were a day of the week, would you be Monday or Wednesday?”, and “Do you believe in life after God?”
The survey is full of leading and ironic questions, and as Ray gathers responses to his survey, he begins interacting with characters around him: a pompously inappropriate boss, a pot-smoking IT employee, a mysterious and beautiful artist, and others all become part of Ray’s hysterical and oft insightful journey. Reminiscent of both Gary Shteyngart and George Saunders, Porter’s debut is an acutely perceptive and sharply funny meditation on what makes people tick. Jason Porter is a graduate of the MFA Program at Hunter College. He is a 2007 Hertog Fellow, a 2011 UCross Artist in Residency, and WHY ARE YOU SO SAD?, which is his first novel, was shortlisted for the 2011 Paris Literary Prize. Prior to his current guise as a fiction writer, Mr. Porter has assumed identities that include the lone overnight editor for The New York Times web site, the London editor for Yahoo! News, an English teacher in Ecuador, and a phone servant to the tech-crazed subscribers of Wired magazine. On more creative fronts Jason has successfully impersonated a rock musician in San Francisco and organized and performed in a musical tour of North American nursing homes and senior centers. He has also had paintings featured in several group shows in Chelsea and Williamsburg. Despite a perfectly happy childhood in southeastern Michigan, he is even happier to now call Brooklyn his home, where he is gradually aging along with his girlfriend and their two nearly perfect mutts.
The survey is full of leading and ironic questions, and as Ray gathers responses to his survey, he begins interacting with characters around him: a pompously inappropriate boss, a pot-smoking IT employee, a mysterious and beautiful artist, and others all become part of Ray’s hysterical and oft insightful journey. Reminiscent of both Gary Shteyngart and George Saunders, Porter’s debut is an acutely perceptive and sharply funny meditation on what makes people tick. Jason Porter is a graduate of the MFA Program at Hunter College. He is a 2007 Hertog Fellow, a 2011 UCross Artist in Residency, and WHY ARE YOU SO SAD?, which is his first novel, was shortlisted for the 2011 Paris Literary Prize. Prior to his current guise as a fiction writer, Mr. Porter has assumed identities that include the lone overnight editor for The New York Times web site, the London editor for Yahoo! News, an English teacher in Ecuador, and a phone servant to the tech-crazed subscribers of Wired magazine. On more creative fronts Jason has successfully impersonated a rock musician in San Francisco and organized and performed in a musical tour of North American nursing homes and senior centers. He has also had paintings featured in several group shows in Chelsea and Williamsburg. Despite a perfectly happy childhood in southeastern Michigan, he is even happier to now call Brooklyn his home, where he is gradually aging along with his girlfriend and their two nearly perfect mutts.
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Book
Published 2014-01-28 by Plume |
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Book
Published 2014-01-28 by Plume |