 | |
| Author | Jonathan Evison |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Soft Skull Press |
Publication date | 2008 July 21 |
| Media type | Print (Paperback) |
| Pages | 344 pp |
| ISBN | 978-1-59376-196-7 |
| OCLC | 181517136 |
| 813/.6 22 | |
| LC Class | PS3605.V57 A795 2008 |
All About Lulu is a coming-of-age novel by American author Jonathan Evison published in 2008. [1] The novel revolves around a family of bodybuilders in Santa Monica from the Summer of Love to the Dot-com bubble.
In the wake of his mother's death, as his bodybuilding brethren pump themselves to Hulkish proportions, weak-eyed vegetarian Will Miller stops growing altogether—until the day his father remarries a relentlessly kind grief counselor, delivering Will a troubled stepsister who soon becomes his confessor, companion, and heart's only desire. But when Lulu returns from cheerleading camp the summer of her fourteenth year, she inexplicably begins to push Will away, forcing him to look elsewhere for meaning.
Major themes in All About Lulu include self-improvement, family, unrequited love, obsession, the American dream, talk radio, and meat.
All About Lulu received a starred review in Publishers Weekly (5/12/08), who called the book “a stunner—viciously funny and deeply felt.” In subsequent reviews, including the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and Seattle P.I., the novel was compared both favorably and unfavorably to J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye , and Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita . In addition to being selected for the Los Angeles Times and Seattle PI summer reading lists, All About Lulu was selected for numerous year-end "Top 10" and "Best of" lists, including Hudson, and Time Out Chicago, and won the 2009 Washington State Book Award. [2]
Jonathan Earl Franzen is an American novelist and essayist. His 2001 novel The Corrections, a sprawling, satirical family drama, drew widespread critical acclaim, earned Franzen a National Book Award, was a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist, earned a James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award. His novel Freedom (2010) garnered similar praise and led to an appearance on the cover of Time magazine alongside the headline "Great American Novelist". Franzen's latest novel Crossroads was published in 2021, and is the first in a projected trilogy.
Dave Eggers is an American writer, editor, and publisher. He wrote the best-selling memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Eggers is also the founder of Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, a literary journal; a co-founder of the literacy project 826 Valencia and the human rights nonprofit Voice of Witness; and the founder of ScholarMatch, a program that matches donors with students needing funds for college tuition. His writing has appeared in several magazines.
Jonathan Allen Lethem is an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. His first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, a genre work that mixed elements of science fiction and detective fiction, was published in 1994. In 1999, Lethem published Motherless Brooklyn, a National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novel that achieved mainstream success. In 2003, he published The Fortress of Solitude, which became a New York Times Best Seller. In 2005, he received a MacArthur Fellowship. Since 2011, he has taught creative writing at Pomona College.
Angle of Repose is a 1971 novel by Wallace Stegner about a wheelchair-using historian, Lyman Ward, who has lost connection with his son and living family and decides to write about his frontier-era grandparents. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1972. The novel is directly based on the letters of Mary Hallock Foote, later published as A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West.
Evan Shelby Connell Jr. was a U.S. novelist, short-story writer, essayist and author of epic historical works. He also published under the name Evan S. Connell Jr.
Ann K. Powers is an American writer and pop music critic. She is a music critic for NPR and a contributor at the Los Angeles Times, where she was previously chief pop critic. She has also served as pop critic at The New York Times and an editor at The Village Voice. Powers is the author of Weird Like Us: My Bohemian America, a memoir; Good Booty: Love and Sex, Black & White, Body and Soul in American Music, on eroticism in American pop music; and Piece by Piece, co-authored with Tori Amos.
San Angeles is a fictional futuristic concept of Southern California typically configured by U.S. commentators and film producers to include the areas of Los Angeles to San Diego and sometimes even San Bernardino to Riverside. Although Los Angeles and the West Coast have been treated as a futuristic concept geographic region by different names in other works — "Los Andiegoles" in the novel A Friend of the Earth, "Rattown" in the novel Dr. Adder, and "Mega City 2" in the comic stories of Judge Dredd; San Angeles remains the more popular identifying description.
Bruce Conner was an American artist who worked with assemblage, film, drawing, sculpture, painting, collage, and photography.
Diane Johnson, is an American novelist and essayist whose satirical novels often feature American heroines living abroad in contemporary France. She was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for her novel Persian Nights in 1988.
Denne Bart Petitclerc was an American journalist, war correspondent, author, television producer, and screenwriter.
Darin Strauss is a best-selling American writer whose work has earned a number of awards, including, among numerous others, a Guggenheim Fellowship and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Strauss's 2011 book Half a Life, won the 2011 NBCC Award for memoir/autobiography. His most recent book, The Queen of Tuesday, came out in August, 2020. It is currently nominated for the Joyce Carol Oates Literary Prize.
Christopher Sorrentino is an American novelist and short story writer of Italian and Puerto Rican descent. He is the son of novelist Gilbert Sorrentino and Victoria Ortiz. His first published novel, Sound on Sound (1995), draws upon innovations pioneered in the work of his father, but also contains echoes of many other modernist and postmodernist writers. The book is structured according to the format of a multitrack recording session, with corresponding section titles.
Gabriel's Story is a novel by American author David Anthony Durham published by Doubleday in 2001.
Americanese is a 2006 American romantic drama film directed by Eric Byler and starring Chris Tashima, Allison Sie, Kelly Hu, Ben Shenkman, Autumn Reeser, and Joan Chen. It is based on the novel American Knees by Shawn Wong, concerning the relationships of a man and woman of East Asian descent in the United States.
Rachel Kushner is an American writer, known for her novels Telex from Cuba (2008), The Flamethrowers (2013), and The Mars Room (2018).
Home is a novel written by the Pulitzer Prize-winning American author Marilynne Robinson. Published in 2008, it is Robinson's third novel, preceded by Housekeeping in 1980 and Gilead in 2004.
Jonathan Evison is an American writer known for his novels All About Lulu, West of Here, The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving, This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance!, Lawn Boy, Legends of the North Cascades, and most recently Small World. His work, often distinguished by its emotional resonance and offbeat humor, has been compared by critics to a variety of authors, most notably J.D. Salinger, Charles Dickens, T.C. Boyle, and John Irving. Sherman Alexie has called Evison "the most honest white man alive."
David Kipen is an author, critic, broadcaster, arts administrator, full-time UCLA writing faculty member and nonprofit bilingual lending librarian. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Alta Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, OZY.com and elsewhere. Former literature director of the National Endowment for the Arts, he lives in his native Southern California.
Antoine Wilson is a Canadian-American novelist and short story writer. He was born in Montreal, Quebec, and later lived in Southern California, Central California, and Saudi Arabia. He attended UCLA and Iowa Writers' Workshop. He currently lives in Los Angeles, where he is a contributing editor of the Brooklyn-based literary magazine A Public Space.
Carolina de Robertis is a Uruguayan-American author and teacher of creative writing at San Francisco State University. She is the author of five novels and the editor of an award-winning anthology, Radical Hope (2017), which include essays by such writers as Junot Diaz and Jane Smiley. She is also well known for her translational work, frequently translating Spanish pieces.
 | This article about a Bildungsroman of the 2000s is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. See guidelines for writing about novels. Further suggestions might be found on the article's talk page. |