Synopses & Reviews
“Like a literary Louis C.K.--Skibell is not shy about exposing the foibles of the man he has become, or his clumsy pursuits of happiness.” —Bret Wood, writer/director
Did Joseph Skibell’s father trick him when he offered his beautiful guitar and then delivered a not-so-beautiful one? Can it be that the telemarketer calling at dinnertime is a thoughtful, sensitive person also looking for a Utopian world? Can a father have any control over his teenage daughter’s sex life? Can a son have control over his father’s expectations? The award-winning writer ponders these and other bewildering questions in his first nonfiction book.
Joseph Skibell is a dreamer, an innocent. As a professor, he may spend time on Big Thoughts, but it’s the small moments in life that he addresses in these essays. With disarming honesty, he gives us an intimate glimpse into his life. True, some of these incidents might make him look like a fool, but that only serves to make him more human. The pleasure in these pieces is accepting, with Skibell, that life is made up of little annoyances, fantasies, imaginings, and delusions--and these are what make us who we are.
“The voice is so beguiling, the tone so sweet and hilarious, you quickly realize that you are in the hands of a master . . . Mr. I. B. Singer, meet Mr. Twain. This is a book to be prized in the way readers prize the work of Charles Portis.” —James Magnuson, author of Famous Writers I Have Known
“These wise and humane offerings aren’t stories; they’re musical notes, from a master composer . . . that will linger in your memory long after reading, as the best music always does.” —Jeremy Dauber, author of The Worlds of Sholem Aleichem
Review
“Joseph Skibell’s immense skills as an imaginative and lyrical novelist serve him well in these touching essays about memory and mysticism. You'll laugh and also feel a little bit achy as you hear the voice of an extraordinary storyteller and a wise and witty friend.” —Heidi Durrow, author of The Girl Who Fell from the Sky
“This book was like candy to me, the best candy, the kind you find yourself tip-toeing into the kitchen for all night long, trying to sneak one more piece before you're ordered to bed . . . The voice is so beguiling, the tone so sweet and hilarious, you quickly realize that you are in the hands of a master . . . Mr. I. B. Singer, meet Mr. Twain. This is a book to be prized in the way readers prize the work of Charles Portis.” —James Magnuson, author of Famous Writers I Have Known
“Veering between laugh-out-loud hilarious and deeply moving . . . Like a literary Louis CK, Skibell is not shy about exposing the foibles of the man he has become, or his clumsy pursuits of happiness.” —Bret Wood, writer/director
“These wise and humane offerings aren’t stories; they’re musical notes, from a master composer. And they swirl and swell and come together and echo one another to create a concerto of love and sadness and warmth and humor that will linger in your memory long after reading, as the best music always does.” —Jeremy Dauber, author of The Worlds of Sholem Aleichem
Synopsis
Often comic, sometimes tender, profoundly truthful, the pleasure in these nonfiction pieces by award-winning novelist Joseph Skibell is discovering along with the author that catastrophes, fantasies, and delusions are what give sweetness and shape to our lives.
As a writer, Skibell has said, I feel about life the way the people of the Plains felt about the buffalo: I want to use every part of it. In My Father s Guitar and Other Imaginary Things, his first nonfiction work, he mines the events of his own life to create a captivating collection of personal essays, a suite of intimate stories that blurs the line between funny and poignant, and between the imaginary and the real.
Often improbable, these stories are 100 percent true. Skibell misremembers the guitar his father promised him; together, he and a telemarketer dream of a better world; a major work of Holocaust art turns out to have been painted by his cousin. Woven together, the stories paint a complex portrait of a man and his family: a businessman father and an artistic son and the difficult love between them; complicated uncles, cousins, and sisters; a haunted house; and of course an imaginary guitar.
Skibell s novels have been praised as startlingly original (the Washington Post), magical (the New Yorker), and the work of a gifted, committed imagination (the New York Times). With his distinctive style, he has been referred to as the bastard love child of Mark Twain, I. B. Singer, and Wes Anderson, left on a doorstep in Lubbock, Texas.
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Synopsis
Often comic, sometimes tender, profoundly truthful, and often improbable, the stories in these nonfiction essays by award-winning novelist Joseph Skibell are 100 percent true, painting a complex portrait of a man and his family--a businessman father and an artistic son and the difficult love between them; complicated uncles, cousins, and sisters; a haunted house; and, of course, an imaginary guitar--and illustrating that catastrophes, fantasies, and delusions are what give sweetness and shape to our lives.
Synopsis
“Like a literary Louis CK—Skibell is not shy about exposing the foibles of the man he has become, or his clumsy pursuits of happiness.” —Bret Wood, writer/director
Did Joseph Skibell’s father trick him when he offered his beautiful guitar and then delivered a not-so-beautiful one? Can it be that the telemarketer calling at dinnertime is a thoughtful, sensitive person also looking for a Utopian world? Can a father have any control over his teenage daughter’s sex life? Can a son have control over his father’s expectations? The award-winning writer ponders these and other bewildering questions in his first nonfiction book.
Joseph Skibell is a dreamer, an innocent. He sees things in a sometimes odd way. The “imaginary things” in his title refers to all those things he observes that are supposed to work, supposed to happen, supposed to make sense. But, like much of life, it doesn’t always work out that way.
As a professor, he may spend time on Big Thoughts, but it’s the small moments in life that he addresses in these essays. With disarming honesty, he gives us an intimate glimpse into his life and is unafraid to depict himself in a less than flattering light. True, some of these incidents might make him look like a fool, but that only serves to make him more human. The pleasure in these pieces is accepting, with Skibell, that life is made up of little annoyances, fantasies, imaginings, and delusions—and these are what make us who we are.
Because Skibell is a brilliant writer, he makes us think, make us laugh, as he offers up the world through his quirky lens.
About the Author
Possessing “a gifted, committed imagination” (New York Times), Joseph Skibell is the author of three novels, A Blessing on the Moon, The English Disease, and A Curable Romantic; the forthcoming collection of nonfiction stories My Father’s Guitar and Other Imaginary Things; and another forthcoming nonfiction work, Six Memos from the Last Millennium: A Novelist Reads the Talmud. He has received numerous awards, including the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Sami Rohr Award in Jewish Literature, Story magazine’s Short Short-Story Prize, and the Turner Prize for First Fiction.
As director of the Richard Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature from 2008 to 2015, he sang and played guitar onstage with both Margaret Atwood and Paul Simon. A professor at Emory University, Skibell has also taught at the University of Wisconsin and the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas. Recently a Senior Fellow at the Bill and Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry, he is the Winship Distinguished Research Professor in the Humanities at Emory University. A native Texan, he lives mostly in his head.