Will Chancellor - A BRAVE MAN SEVEN STOREYS TALL
A triumphant literary debut with notes of both THE ART OF FIELDING
and THE FLAMETHROWERS, which introduces the striking figure of Owen
Burr, a gifted Olympics-bound athlete whose dreams of greatness are
deferred and then transformed by an unlikely journey from California to
Berlin, Athens, Iceland, and back again.Owen Burr, a towering
athlete at Stanford University, son of renowned classicist Professor
Joseph Burr, was destined to compete in the Athens Olympic Games of
2004. But in his final match at Stanford, he is blinded in one eye. The
wound shatters his identity and any prospects he had as an athlete.Determined
to make a new name for himself, Owen flees the country and lands in
Berlin, where he meets a group of wildly successful artists living in
the Teutonic equivalent of Warhol's Factory. An irresistible
sight--nearly seven-feet-tall, wearing an eye patch and a corduroy
suit--Owen is quickly welcomed by the group's leader, who schemes to
appropriate Owen's image and sell the results at Art Basel. With his
warped and tortured image on the auction block, Owen seeks revenge.Professor
Burr has never been the father he wants to be. Owen's disappearance
triggers a call to action. He dusts off his more speculative theory,
Liminalism, to embark on a speaking tour, pushing theory to its radical
extreme--at his own peril and with Jean Baudrillard's help--in order to
send up flares for his son in Athens, Berlin, and Iceland.A
compulsively readable novel of ideas, action, and intrigue, A BRAVE MAN SEVEN STOREYS TALL offers a persuasive vision of personal agency, art,
family, and the narratives we build for ourselves.
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WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 17 -- 7 PM
A scintillating satire of the American abroad, a rumination on time and the human heart, a bittersweet romance of chances lost, by an author The New York Times has hailed as "inspired, lyrical," "elegiac," "ingenious," as well as "too sappy by half," Less shows a writer at the peak of his talents raising the curtain on our shared human comedy.