Synopses & Reviews
Who in the world is Calliope Bird?
Calliope Bird Morath, that is. Poet. Celebrity. Death Artist.
Her father, Brandt Morath, was a legendary punk-rock star whose suicide devastated the world. Her mother, Penny Power, has spent a decade grieving, keeping Brandt's memory alive, and preparing Calliope for fame. Now Calliope has grown up to be a star in her own right, trading on her family name, trying to navigate the worlds of art and celebrity, academia and psychotherapy and Zen Buddhism, all while exploring the mysteries surrounding her father's life and death. Because of her own unreliable memories and the obsessive speculation of her father's fans, she comes to believe that her father might still be alive, and she abandons her own life to try and find him.
And, in turn, Calliope's obsessive biographer abandons life and family in search of Calliope. Together they chronicle her story, from her silent childhood to her first tortured public statements about her father; from her publication of a wildly popular book of poetry to her mysterious disappearance; from her return as the mute leader of a cultlike brigade known as The Muse to her last, terrifying crusade.
Ultimately, the biographer, whose own tragic history is revealed only in glimpses, clashes with Calliope's in a spectacular showdown in the Mojave Desert.
Review
"In these pages Andrew Altschul conducts the wildest possible love affair with style. These pages are lit by the most seditious literary cunning... Andrew Altschul may be shinily modern - postmodern - in every other way, but he is also that ancient thing, a born storyteller capable of breaking your heart."
Review
"At last, a term for the self-destructive celebrities that so fascinate (and dominate) American culture: Death Artists."
Review
"Astounding... You've never read anything quite like it."
Review
"In these pages Andrew Altschul conducts the wildest possible love affair with style. These pages are lit by the most seditious literary cunning... Andrew Altschul may be shinily modern - postmodern - in every other way, but he is also that ancient thing, a born storyteller capable of breaking your heart."
(Elizabeth Tallent)
Review
"Altschul playfully and humorously delivers his novel in a pseudo-documentary style while exploring the serious themes of truth, group hysteria, and the transience of human existence."--Library Journal
--Kirkus Reviews
Review
"At last, a term for the self-destructive celebrities that so fascinate (and dominate) American culture: Death Artists."
--San Francisco Magazine
Review
ADVANCE PRAISE FOR
LADY LAZARUS"Andrew Altschul may be shinily modernpostmodernin every other way, but he is also that ancient thing, a born storyteller capable of breaking your heart."Elizabeth Tallent, author of Museum Pieces
Review
"Lady Lazarus is a brilliant examination of the cultural pull exerted by the famous and the dead. Many ghosts haunt the pages of this gripping novel. It casts over the reader that same spell cast by the real-life stories of the talented and the doomed."
Review
"Altschul is one of our great young writers, and Lady Lazarus is the proof. A poetic satire of rock and roll, and a rock and roll ode to poetry, it mirrors its heroine: smart, gorgeous, and funny as hell."
Review
"A sort of Gen X answer to Don DeLillo's boomer epic
Underworld; it uses alt rock as a springboard to address all of the human condition."
Review
"Astounding... Youve never read anything quite like it."
--Minneapolis Star Tribune
Review
"
Lady Lazarus is fun, sure, but Altschul is serious as a heart attack... A certain Seattle band is only the starting point of this smart, funny, breath-taking novel about celebrity, literature, and the elusive truth."
Review
"Altschul is one smart cookie and a fabulist of no little talent.
Lady Lazarus is ambitious, virtuostic, epic, and worthy of the oohs and ahhs of literate rock fans... Maybe tell them it's the
Quadrophenia of books?"
Review
"Some of the smartest, insightful, and flat-out funny writing about rock and roll celebrity since Neal Pollack's
Never Mind the Pollacks."
Review
"If you're a fan of postmodern fiction... Altschul's debut makes an excellent addition to the canon. You should read this book."
Review
"Altschul writes in gorgeous, fluid prose with a slyly ironic tone."
--Elizabeth Tallent
Review
"
Lady Lazarus takes the idea of celebrity and turns it upside down... This debut novel reads like a rock biography but ends up questioning the importance of art in a postmodern world. "
Synopsis
"Altschul is one of our great young writers, and Lady Lazarus is the proof. A poetic satire of rock and roll, and a rock and roll ode to poetry, it mirrors its heroine: smart, gorgeous, and funny as hell." --Andrew Sean Greer, author of The Confessions of Max Tivoli
These pages are lit by the most seditious literary cunning. This big, taunting, passionate, ambitious tale, told in a multiplicity of voices, skewers our culture's infatuation with surfaces and our habit of maiming or killing the objects of our collective infatuation: this is glittering wordplay whose bottom note is sorrow. Andrew Altschul may be shinily modern--postmodern--in every other way, but he is also that ancient thing, a born storyteller capable of breaking your heart."Elizabeth Tallent, author of Museum Pieces