Artificial Light Paperback by James Greer

Product Details

• Publisher: Akashic Books, Ltd. (2006-07-04)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 336 pages
• ISBN-13: 9781933354002
• Item Weight: 368.55 grams
• Dimensions: 0.0 x 0.0 x 0.0 cm

A new installment in Dennis Cooper’s “Little House on the Bowery” series.

“Greer does a superb job of transcending conventional genrefication, bringing something fresh to contemporary literature . . . A very enjoyable read [with a] highly inventive structure, full of eccentricities and rock music factoids . . .” —Library Journal

In 1994, a young woman named Fiat Lux donates twenty-one notebooks full of her writings to a university library and then disappears. It’s only later that her close relationship with a well known rock musician who had recently committed suicide is discovered, and the notebook’s contents become the subject of growing fascination, conjecture, and gossip. Intending to satisfy the public’s insatiable curiosity about the rock star and throw light on the author’s rumored involvement in his now infamous death, and, more importantly, hoping to make a case for her remarkable writings as a work of literature, the university’s press has decided to publish her notebooks in a single volume under the title she had given them, Artificial Light.

Set in the mythological land of Dayton, Ohio, Artificial Light is part historical novel, part science fiction, part sociological study, part murder mystery. Stunningly written in prose that is poetic, gripping, and highly adventurous, Artificial Light may be the first American novel to successfully treat the alternative rock scene of the 1990s as a subject for serious literature. James Greer has written a novel at once completely original in its form, composition, and outlook and yet as classically pleasurable and informative as any work of contemporary fiction in memory.

About the Author

JAMES GREER is the author of The Failure, Artificial Light (which won a California Book Award for Best Debut Novel), and the nonfiction book Guided By Voices: A Brief History (Grove), a biography about a band for which he once played bass guitar. He is currently working on a rock musical about Cleopatra starring Catherine Zeta-Jones. He lives in Los Angeles.