Author | David Bowman |
---|---|
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Publisher | Little, Brown and Company |
Publication date | January 15, 2019 |
Media type | Print (hardcover) |
Pages | 624 |
ISBN | 978-0316560238 |
Big Bang is a 2019 novel by American writer David Bowman, published almost seven years after his death. The introduction is by Jonathan Lethem [1] and was excerpted in The New Yorker . [2] It is Bowman's fourth book and the only one not published in his lifetime. [3] Bowman worked on it for more than a decade. [4] Its working title was Tall Cool One. [5]
The novel is set in the 1950s and early 1960s, and includes John F. Kennedy, Norman Mailer, Pat Nixon, E. Howard Hunt, Carl Djerassi, Marilyn Monroe, Willem de Kooning, Ngo Dinh Diem, a pre-fame Jimi Hendrix, Lee Radziwill, Benjamin Spock, and other politicians, writers, celebrities, and notables of the era. [6] Bowman had referred to Big Bang as a "nonfiction novel." [7]
In its review of Big Bang, The New York Times called Bowman "an abundantly talented writer." [8] Kirkus Reviews wrote that the book "is sui generis, the kind of novel that invents its form out of its own frenzied convocation of voices and moments: the 20th century in all its majesty and fear." [9]
Critics have compared Big Bang to Don DeLillo's Libra and Underworld . [10] [8] DeLillo, as a young adman, appears as a character in Bowman's book. [10]
Donald Richard DeLillo is an American novelist, short story writer, playwright, screenwriter and essayist. His works have covered subjects as diverse as television, nuclear war, the complexities of language, art, mathematics, politics, economics, and baseball.
William Thomas Gaddis, Jr. was an American novelist. The first and longest of his five novels, The Recognitions, was named one of TIME magazine's 100 best novels from 1923 to 2005 and two others, J R and A Frolic of His Own, won the annual U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. A collection of his essays was published posthumously as The Rush for Second Place (2002). The Letters of William Gaddis was published by Dalkey Archive Press in February 2013.
Collage novel is used by different writers and readers to describe three different kinds of novel: 1) a form of artist's book approaching closely the graphic novel; 2) a literary novel that approaches "collage" metaphorically, juxtaposing different modes of original writing; and 3) a novel that approaches collage literally, incorporating found language and possibly combining other modes of original writing.
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.
Libra is a 1988 novel by Don DeLillo that describes the life of Lee Harvey Oswald and his participation in a fictional CIA conspiracy to assassinate President John F. Kennedy. The novel blends historical fact with fictional supposition.
Mao II, published in 1991, is Don DeLillo's tenth novel. The book tells the story of a novelist, struggling to finish a novel, who travels to Lebanon to assist a writer being held hostage. The title is derived from a series of Andy Warhol silkscreen prints depicting Mao Zedong. DeLillo dedicated the book to his friend Gordon Lish. Major themes of the book include crowds and the effects of political terrorism. Mao II received positive reviews from critics and won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1992.
End Zone is Don DeLillo's second novel, published in 1972.
Stephen Michael Erickson is an American novelist. The author of influential works such as Days Between Stations, Tours of the Black Clock, Zeroville and Shadowbahn, he is the recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters award, the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award and a Guggenheim fellowship.
Motherless Brooklyn is a novel by Jonathan Lethem that was first published in 1999. The story is set in Brooklyn, and follows Lionel Essrog, a detective who has Tourette's, a disorder marked by involuntary tics. Essrog works for Frank Minna, a small-time neighborhood owner of a "seedy and makeshift" detective agency. Together, Essrog and three other characters—Tony, Danny, and Gilbert—call themselves "the Minna Men".
The Names (1982) is the seventh novel of American novelist Don DeLillo. The work, set mostly in Greece, is primarily a series of character studies, interwoven with a plot about a mysterious "language cult" that is behind a number of unexplained murders. Among the many themes explored throughout the work is the intersection of language and culture, the perception of American culture from both within and outside its borders, and the impact that narration has on the facts of a story.
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.
David Goodwillie is an American novelist, memoirist and journalist. He has published three books: the novels Kings County and American Subversive, and the memoir Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time.
Charles Chowkai Yu is an American writer. He is the author of the novels How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe and Interior Chinatown, as well as the short-story collections Third Class Superhero and Sorry Please Thank You. In 2007 he was named a "5 under 35" honoree by the National Book Foundation. In 2020, Interior Chinatown won the National Book Award for fiction.
Maureen Theresa Howard was an American novelist, memoirist, and editor. Her award-winning novels feature women protagonists and are known for formal innovation and a focus on the Irish-American experience.
Point Omega is a short novel by the American author Don DeLillo that was published in hardcover by Scribner's on February 2, 2010. It is DeLillo's fifteenth novel published under his own name and his first published work of fiction since his 2007 novel Falling Man.
Black Clock was an American literary magazine that published twenty-one issues over twelve years. Edited by Steve Erickson, the magazine was "dedicated to fiction, poetry and creative essays that explore the frontier of constructive anarchy...Black Clock is audacious rather than safe, visceral rather than academic, intellectually engaging rather than antiseptically cerebral, and not above fun. Produced by writers for writers, Black Clock encourages risk and eschews editorial interference."
Nebula Awards Showcase 2000 is an anthology of science fiction short works edited by Gregory Benford. It was first published in hardcover and trade paperback by Harcourt in April 2000.
Michael Farris Smith is an American writer from Mississippi. As of 2021, Smith has published six novels: The Hands of Strangers (2011), Rivers (2013), Desperation Road (2017), The Fighter (2018), Blackwood (2020), and Nick (2021).
David Bowman is an American writer. He published two novels and one book of music criticism before his death in 2012, at age 54. A third novel, Big Bang, was published on January 15, 2019, by Little, Brown and Company. Bowman also wrote for Salon.
The Ministry for the Future is a climate fiction ("cli-fi") novel by American science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson published in 2020. Set in the near future, the novel follows a subsidiary body, established under the Paris Agreement, whose mission is to act as an advocate for the world's future generations of citizens as if their rights are as valid as the present generation's. While they pursue various ambitious projects, the effects of climate change are determined to be the most consequential. The plot primarily follows Mary Murphy, the head of the titular Ministry for the Future, and Frank May, an American aid worker traumatized by experiencing a deadly heat wave in India. Many chapters are devoted to other characters' accounts of future events, as well as their ideas about ecology, economics, and other subjects.