David Markson

Wittgenstein's Mistress is a novel unlike anything David Markson or anyone else has ever written before. It is the story of a woman who is convinced and, astonishingly, will ultimately convince the reader as well that she is the only person left on earth. Presumably she is mad. And yet so appealing is her character, and so witty and seductive her narrative voice, that we will follow her hypnotically as she unloads the intellectual baggage of a lifetime in a series of irreverent meditations on everything and everybody from Brahms to sex to Heidegger to Helen of Troy. And as she contemplates aspects of the troubled past which have brought her to her present state—obviously a metaphor for ultimate loneliness—so too will her drama become one of the few certifiably original fictions of our time. “The novel I liked best this year,” said the Washington Times upon the book’s publication; “one dizzying, delightful, funny passage after another . . . Wittgenstein’s Mistress gives proof positive that the experimental novel can produce high, pure works of imagination.”

David Markson was a writer like no other. In his novels, which have been called  hypnotic,"  stunning," and  exhilarating" and earned him praise from the likes of Kurt Vonnegut and David Foster Wallace, Ann Beattie and Zadie Smith. Markson created his own personal genre. With crackling wit distilled into incantatory streams of thought on art, life, and death, Markson's work has delighted and astonished readers for decades. Now for the first time, three of Markson's masterpieces are compiled into one page-turning volume: This Is Not a Novel, Vanishing Point, and The Last Novel. In This Is Not a Novel, readers meet an author, called only  Writer," who is weary unto death of making up stories, and yet is determined to seduce the reader into turning pages and getting somewhere. Vanishing Point introduces us to  Author," who sets out to transform shoeboxes crammed with note cards into a novel. In The Last Novel, we find an elderly author (referred to only as  Novelist") who announces that, since this will be his final effort, he possesses  carte blanche to do anything he damn well pleases." United by their focus on the trials, calamities, absurdities and even tragedies of the creative life, these novels demonstrate David Markson's extraordinary intellectual richness leaving readers, time after time, with the most indisputably original of reading experiences.

In this spellbinding, utterly unconventional fiction, an aging author who is identified only as Reader contemplates the writing of a novel. As he does, other matters insistently crowd his mind - literary and cultural anecdotes, endless quotations attributed and not, scholarly curiosities - the residue of a lifetime's reading which is apparently all he has to show for his decades on earth. Out of these unlikely yet incontestably fascinating materials - including innumerable details about the madness and calamity in many artists' and writers' lives, the eternal critical affronts, the startling bigotry, the countless suicides - David Markson has created a novel of extraordinary intellectual suggestiveness. But while shoring up Reader's ruins with such fragments, Markson has also managed to electrify his novel with an almost unbearable emotional impact. Where Reader ultimately leads us is shattering.

"Yksi aikansa omaperäisimmistä romaaneista." - American Book Review. "Syvästi palkitseva lukukokemus." - Kurt Vonnegut. Lukijan luomislukko (Reader's Block, 1996) on "postmodernin fiktion" ikoneihin kuuluvan David Marksonin tunnetuimpia teoksia ja hänen "henkilökohtaiseksi" luonnehditun myöhäisteosten sarjansa käynnistäjä. Vanheneva kirjailija taistelee käsikirjoituksensa kanssa muistojen ja elämän varrella opitun tulviessa mielikuvituksen tielle. Hänen päähenkilönsä taas on muuttanut kaupungista kuumuutta ja köyhyyttä pakoon hylätylle hautausmaalle – vai sittenkin autiolle merenrannalle? Tuloksena on kollaasi, jossa ajelehtii lainauksia kirjallisuudesta, musiikista ja kuvataiteesta sekä tarinoita taiteilijoista ja tieteentekijöistä, heidän syntymistään ja kuolemistaan ja kaikesta siltä väliltä parisuhteista terveysongelmiin. Lukijan luomislukko on yhtä aikaa vangitseva peli, anekdoottien aarreaitta, ja koskettava ja hirtehishumoristinen kertomus vanhuudesta ja luovuudesta. "Lauseet, joita kierrätetään yli romaanin kaaren, toimivat kuin tiiliholvi: ne asettuvat toistensa lomaan kannattelemaan toisiaan ja muita romaanin fragmentteja muodostaen täsmällisen ja jäntevän kokonaisuuden." (Kääntäjät jälkisanoissaan)Lukijan luomislukko on David Marksonin ensimmäinen suomennettu teos. Samanaikaisesti sen kanssa julkaistaan Kari Aronpuron toinen proosateos Kääntäjän floppi, joka on muun ohella Marksonin teoksen pastissi.

Although best known today for his singular, stunning  anti-novels" dazzlingly conjured from anecdotes, quotes, and small thoughts, in his early days David Markson paid the rent by writing punchy, highly dramatic fictions. On the heels of a new double edition of his steamy noirs Epitaph for a Tramp and Epitaph for a Deadbeat comes a new edition of his 1965 classic The Ballad of Dingus Magee, whose subtitle  Immortal True Saga of the Most Notorious and Desperate Bad Man of the Olden Days, his Blood-Shedding, his Ruination of Poor Helpless Females, & Cetera"  gives readers a hint of the raucous sensibility at work here. Brimming with blasphemy, bullets, and bordellos, this hilarious tale, which inspired the Frank Sinatra movie Dirty Dingus McGee, shows the early Markson at his outrageous best, taking down, as Playboy put it,  the breeches of the Old West and blast[ing] what's exposed with buckshot."

A minimalist piece by the author of This Is Not a Novel follows the story of Novelist, an elderly author who sets out to pen his final work strictly in accordance with his own satisfaction, an endeavor that is challenged by his age, solitude, and the successes and failures of others. Original.

Before achieving critical acclaim as a novelist, David Markson paid the rent by writing several crime novels, including two featuring the private detective Harry Fannin. Together here in one volume, these works are now available to a new generation of readers. In Epitaph for a Tramp, Fannin isn't called out to investigate a murder  it happens on his doorstop. In the sweltering heat of a New York August night, he answers the buzzer at his door to find his promiscuous ex-wife dying from a knife wound. To find her killer, Fannin plies his trade with classic hard-boiled aplomb. In the second novel, Epitaph for a Dead Beat, Fannin finds himself knee-deep in murder among the beatniks and bohemians of the early 1960s, where blood seems to flow as readily as cheap Chianti. Intricately plotted and rife with wisecracks, David Markson offers suspenseful and literary crime novels.

Unlike David Markson's most recent works, including Vanishing Point and Wittgenstein's Mistress, which David Foster Wallace described as "pretty much the high point of experimental fiction in this country," his early novel, Going Down, is a more traditional effort, a masterfully plotted narrative set in Mexico in the 1960s. Three Americans, a man and two women, are living together in obvious intimacy. Their habits, strange to the Mexicans, are strangest of all to themselves. When Fern Winters' attention is caught by movement behind a window in a run-down Greenwich Village apartment building, she can't suspect that her encounter with the apartment's occupant will eventually lead her to be come upon in an abandoned chapel, in a tiny mountain village clutching the bloody machete with which one of the three has been murdered. Going Down is a rarity among novels brilliantly and poetically written, faultlessly constructed, centered on fully realized people, and yet completely uninhibited in its depiction of startling eroticism.

In the literary world, there is little that can match the excitement of opening a new book by David Markson. From Wittgenstein's Mistress to Reader's Block to Springer's Progress to This Is Not a Novel, he has delighted and amazed readers for decades. And now comes his latest masterwork, Vanishing Point, wherein an elderly writer (identified only as "Author") sets out to transform shoeboxes crammed with notecards into a novel and in so doing will dazzle us with an astonishing parade of revelations about the trials and calamities and absurdities and often even tragedies of the creative life and all the while trying his best (he says) to keep himself out of the tale. Naturally he will fail to do the latter, frequently managing to stand aside and yet remaining undeniably central throughout until he is swept inevitably into the narrative's starting and shattering climax. A novel of death and laughter both and of extraordinary intellectual richness.

This Is Not a Novel is a highly inventive work which drifts "genre-less," somewhere in between fiction, nonfiction, and psychological memoir. In the opening pages of the "novel," a narrator, called only "Writer," announces that he is tired of inventing characters, contemplating plot, setting, theme, and conflict. Yet the writer is determined to seduce the reader into turning pages-and to "get somewhere," nonetheless. What follows are pages crammed with short lines of astonishingly fascinating literary and artistic anecdotes, quotations, and cultural curiosities. This Is Not a Novel is leavened with Markson's deliciously ironic wit and laughter, so that when the writer does indeed finally get us "somewhere" it's the journey will have mattered as much as the arrival.