• About
  • Privacy Policy
  • Disclaimer
  • Contact

Free kindle book downloads

  • Home
  • How To Download
Home » Literature » Mount Terminus: A Novel

Mount Terminus: A Novel

Unknown
Add Comment
Literature
Sunday, May 26, 2013

Mount Terminus: A Novel

Author: Visit Amazon's David Grand Page | Language: English | ISBN: 0374280886 | Format: EPUB

Mount Terminus: A Novel Description

Review

"Mount Terminus is serious and funny, singular and rousing: a strange and memorable American monument in prose. It begins formidably and keeps growing. Best of all, it will bring David Grand into full recognition as one of the major writers working today." —Darin Strauss, author of Chang and Eng and Half a Life

"Mount Terminus is a spellbinding, atmospheric epic from a writer at the top of his game. It’s a story layered with transformations: Bloom’s blossoming into an artist, the California desert’s urbanization, and, brilliantly, the photograph’s development into the moving image. Mount Terminus is cinematic in scope and narrative: a richly imagined masterpiece brought to you in GRANDVISION™." —Wesley Stace, author of Misfortune and Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer

"Few novels set in motion an entire world, as this one does an imagined Los Angeles. Mount Terminus is as mercurial, witty, and sad as the best silent film. With his beautifully measured and stylish prose, David Grand has managed to create a rare story that is both epic and intimate, both intelligent and full of heart. I won’t ever forget the pure joy of Bloom the artist, alone as he is in this lost, majestic landscape." —Rene Steinke, author of The Fires and Holy Skirts

"I look to David Grand not just as a fellow writer but as a master of his craft. Mount Terminus is dark, elegant, and rich, his best book to date. It is also one of the finest, most elegiac novels about California I’ve ever read." —Gary Shteyngart, author of The Russian Debutante's Handbook and Super Sad True Love Story

About the Author

David Grand is the author of Louse and The Disappearing Body. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and twin sons.

See all Editorial Reviews
  • Product Details
  • Table of Contents
  • Reviews
  • Hardcover: 384 pages
  • Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (March 4, 2014)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0374280886
  • ISBN-13: 978-0374280888
  • Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 1.2 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
David Grand's Mount Terminus is an ultimate coming-of-age story; it also concerns itself with the coming-of-age of an artist: the protagonist, Bloom. Beyond the journeying, the discovering of self, Grand gracefully builds a dramatic and subtle interior and exterior world.

The serious business here is that Grand has written an essential origin story that builds like layers of limestone. His complicated characters grow into in a world that doesn't quite exist yet - pre-modern Los Angeles - and this central question of origin asserts itself as a universal and spiritual focus for his inhabitants.

Mount Terminus is a book that dives deep. What I like most is it's assured originality, it's surprising strangeness. I think there is much to be said, in our own modern age of disappearing attention spans and rapidly changing technology, about newness and how or why we should embrace change. We must and we are better off for it. Invention and modernity exist at the core of Bloom's California, and these are also the reasons to embrace this serious text. There is a lot to discover and love.

Grand's landscapes are culled from the hard earth of the American West and are just as beautifully written; the language is much like the landscapes he invents - familiar and packed with so much time, so much life. Through Bloom, Grand takes the time to name what he sees in the new world, the beginning of everything we take for granted.

Beyond the landscape are the technologies of early filmmaking: phasmatropes, kinetoscopes, zoetropes, and the glass telescope through which Bloom watches the world of Hollywood being built below him.
"Mount Terminus," by David Grand, is like no book I've ever read before. It's surreal, dark, enigmatic, outlandish, and most of all, extraordinarily dense. Yes, I have to emphasize that part, dense. Remember that. It is the single best word to describe this novel. In fact, it reads like an impenetrable onslaught of phantasmagorical literary imagery. The prose can be both artistically stunning and mind-numbing: some parts are like a stylized tragic postmodern opera; others are like a fanciful and delightful adult fairy tale; and still others reminded me of Haruki Murakami, Franz Kafka, and Edgar Allen Poe all mixed together. And yes, there were times I shook my head and thought I'd slipped momentarily and crazily into some kind of literary steampunk world of anachronistic technologies.

Much of the time this book was more exhausting than enjoyable. I found it incredibly draining to cut through all that lush fantastical imagery to find and follow the threads of the plot within. However in the end, I was happy I read the book. I admit that I almost gave up on it many times. The imagery was so dense and constant that it actually made my brain ache. My mind protested being forced persistently to imagine so much outside its own experience. It felt battered and assaulted by a deluge of bizarre mental pictures. One can only take so much and then the mind goes numb. Perhaps had I read it slowly, savoring the eccentric intellectual and literary delights of every page, the book would have been more pleasing. However, if I'd read it at that pace, it would have taken many weeks to finish. I have a stack of books waiting to read and review. I did not have that type of time to spare. I wish I had.

Mount Terminus: A Novel Preview

Link

Please Wait...

0 Response to "Mount Terminus: A Novel"

← Newer Post Older Post → Home
Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

Social

127098
Fans
109987
Followers
29987
Followers
10923
Subcribers

Label

  • Art
  • Biography
  • Business
  • Calendars
  • Children
  • Comics
  • Computer
  • Cookbooks
  • Craft
  • Education
  • Engineering
  • Health
  • History
  • Humor
  • Literature
  • Medical
  • Mystery
  • Parenting
  • Politics
  • Religion
  • Romance

Page

  • Home
Powered by Blogger.
Back to top!
Copyright 2013 Free kindle book downloads - All Rights Reserved Design by Mas Sugeng - Powered by Blogger and Google