Jay Kirk

Avoid the Day (eBook, ePUB)

A New Nonfiction in Two Movements

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

"Avoid the
Day truly seems to me to push nonfiction memoir as far as it can go
without it collapsing into a singularity and I am at a loss for words. You are
just going to have to read it." Helen Macdonald, author of H is for
Hawk

A surreal, high-wire act of narrative nonfiction that redefines the genre, Avoid the Day is part detective story, part memoir, and part meditation on the meaning of lifeall told with a dark pulse of existential horror. What emerges is an unforgettable study of mortality and the artist's journey.
Seeking to answer the mystery of a missing manuscript by Béla
Bartók, and using the investigation to avoid his father's deathbed, award-winning
magazine writer Jay Kirk heads off to Transylvania, going to the same villages
where the Master, like a vampire in search of fresh plasma, had found his new
material in the folk music of the peasants. With these stolen songs, Bartók
redefined music in the 20^th Century. Kirk, who is also seeking to
renew his writing, finds inspiration in the composer's unorthodox methods, but begins
to lose his tether as he sees himself in Bartók's darkest and most personal work,
the Cantata Profana, which
revolves around the curse of fathers and sons.
After a near-psychotic episode under the spell of Bartók, the
author suddenly finds himself on a posh eco-tourist cruise in the Arctic.
There, accompanied by an old friend, now a documentary filmmaker, the two decide
to scrap the documentary and make a horror flick insteadshot under the noses
of the unsuspecting passengers and crew. Playing one of the main characters who
finds himself inexplicably trapped on a ship at the literal end of the
world, alone, and
under the influence of the midnight sun, Kirk gets lost in his own cerebral
maze, struggling to answer his most plaguing question: can we find meaning in
experience?

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: HarperCollins
• Seitenzahl: 320
• Erscheinungstermin: 28. Juli 2020
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780062356185
• Artikelnr.: 57103919

Autorenporträt

JAY KIRK is the author of Kingdom Under Glass, named one of the Best Nonfiction Books of 2010 by the Washington Post. His award-winning nonfiction has been published in Harper's, GQ, the New York Times Magazine, and anthologized in Best American Crime Writing, Best American Travel Writing, and Submersion Journalism: Reporting in the Radical First Person from Harper's Magazine. He is the recipient of a Whiting Award, a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, and was a finalist for the 2013 National Magazine Award. He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Pennsylvania, where he founded XFic.org, a journal of experimental nonfiction.