Synopses & Reviews
There's Rob, Bob, Tom, Paul, Ralph, and Phil; Siegfried, the sculptor in burning steel; blind Albert and ninety-three-year-old Hiram; Foster, the New Age psychoanalyst; and Maxwell, the tropical botanist, who, since returning from the rain forest, has seemed a little screwed up somehow. When PEN/Faulkner Award finalist Donald Antrim brings them and their eighty-nine equally eccentic kinsmen together in the decaying library of their family estate for cocktails, a light supper, and a little ritual sacrifice, the result suggests a high-speed collision between
The Brothers Karamazov and the Brothers Marx. Moving swiftly from slapstick to horror and back,
The Hundred Brothers establishes Antrim as one of our most mordantly and satanically playful young writers, whose insights into the agonies of kinship are as serious as they are hilarious.
Review:
"Even as we laugh at the novel's absurdity, at its brutal, skewing and amplified portrait of fraternity run amok, its madness rings both sad and disarmingly true." Chicago Tribune
Review:
"Elegant, outrageously imagined, comic... Antrim exaggerates his narrator into hilarious existence." The New Yorker
Review:
"Gloriously unhinged... A slapstick tour through the realms...previously explored by Jung and Joseph Campbell." San Francisco Chronicle
Review:
"To read it is to enter a parallel universe somewhere between worlds of myth and mammon." Entertainment Weekly
Review:
"
The Hundred Brothers may be the most fascinating balancing act you'll witness in American fiction this year.... This remarkable book remains true to its central human subject: 'the sorry indignities that pass as currency between us in lieu of gentler tender.'"
Dwight Garner, SalonSynopsis:
With this satanically funny novel Donald Antrim establishes himself as a literary provocateur of the first order as well as a grandmaster of the subject of sibling rivalry as he bring together 11 eccentric brothers in the decaying library of their family estate for cocktails, a light supper, and a little ritual sacrifice.
About the Author
Donald Antrim's first novel,
Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World, was published in 1993. His work has appeared in
Harper's magazine, the
New Yorker, and the
Paris Review. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.
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