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May 11, 2007

TEV GIVEAWAY (AND L.A. EVENT): ARTHUR PHILLIPS'S ANGELICA

As we mentioned earlier this week during our interview with Arthur Phillips, we're happy to offer a copy of his new novel Angelica for today's TEV giveaway, coinciding with his appearance this evening at Vroman's Bookstore in Pasadena.

Here's what the Vroman's site has to say about the book:

Ang From the bestselling author of "The Egyptologist "and "Prague" comes an even more accomplished and entirely surprising new novel. Angelica is a spellbinding Victorian ghost story, an intriguing literary and psychological puzzle, and a meditation on marriage, childhood, memory, and fear.

The novel opens in London, in the 1880s, with the Barton household on the brink of collapse. Mother, father, and daughter provoke one another, consciously and unconsciously, and a horrifying crisis is triggered. As the family’s tragedy is told several times from different perspectives, events are recast and sympathies shift.

In the dark of night, a chilling sexual spectre is making its way through the house, hovering over the sleeping girl and terrorizing her fragile mother. Are these visions real, or is there something more sinister, and more human, to fear? A spiritualist is summoned to cleanse the place of its terrors, but with her arrival the complexities of motive and desire only multiply. The mother’ s failing health and the father’ s many secrets fuel the growing conflicts, while the daughter flirts dangerously with truth and fantasy.

While "Angelica "is reminiscent of such classic horror tales as "The Turn of the Screw" and "The Haunting of Hill House," it is also a thoroughly modern exploration of identity, reality, and love. Set at the dawn of psychoanalysis and the peak of spiritualism’ s acceptance, Angelica is also an evocative historical novel that explores the timeless human hunger for certainty. “

"Angelica," Arthur Phillip's spellbinding third book, cements this young novelist's reputation as one of the best writers in America, a storytellerwho combines Nabokovian wit and subtlety with a narrative urgency that rivals Stephen King" – "Washington Post"

You can read an excerpt from the novel here and find a sampling of reviews here.  Following our new model, we'll be accepting emails until around 3 p.m. (or so), so drop us an email with the subject line "TURN MY SCREW"  Please please please remember to include your mailing address.  (Every week, two or three of you don't, and those entries aren't counted.)  And previous winners are ineligible.  This means you, Mr. Forest Hills.  Once the emails are in, we'll hit the Random Number Generator and announce a winner.

Pasadena is a bit far for us but we are still toying with making the trek out to 626.  Hope to see you there if we make it out, and if we don't, we'll take on-the-scene reports ...

UPDATE:  Congratulations to winner Nicholas Minear of Chicago.  And to the rest of you who tried, if you're in the L.A. area, go grab the book at Vroman's tonight, and have it signed while you're there.

Posted at 03:01 AM in Giveaways |

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TEV DEFINED


  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

SECOND LOOK

  • The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

    Bs

    Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.
  • The Rider by Tim Krabbe

    Rider_4

    Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."

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