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Harper C.: Five Book Friday: Uncanny Graphic Novels (0 comment)
We are in the thick of winter here in the Pacific Northwest, which means it's dark, damp, and chilly. Rather than escaping to stories with warmer, brighter climates, I personally want nothing more than to dive deep into gothic and uncanny fiction as the wind rattles my windows at night...
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Half Life

by Shelley Jackson
Half Life

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ISBN13: 9780060882358
ISBN10: 0060882352
Condition: Standard


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Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments

A brilliant, disquieting first novel about a pair of conjoined twins who are deeply unhappy in each other's company. Nora, the dominant twin, is strong, funny, and deeply independent, thirsting for love and adventure. Blanche, by contrast, has been sleeping for nearly twenty years. Finally sick of carrying her sister's dead weight, Nora decides she wants her other half gone for good, so she leaves San Francisco for London in search of the mysterious Unity Foundation, which promises to make two one. And that one, of course, will be Nora -- Blanche will be mourned, but not missed.

But once Nora arrives in London, her past begins to surface in surprising and disturbing ways, forcing her into a most reluctant voyage into memory. Something seems to be drawing Nora's thoughts back to the site of her rather unusual conception, birth, and childhood -- the reconstructed ghost town of Too Bad, Nevada, where lizards skitter across the playa and "Shootout at Noon" comes every day. Searching for meaning and understanding in both her own and Blanche's past, Nora pushes herself to the brink of insanity -- and begins to question her own, and Blanche's, grip on the truth. Grotesque, funny, intricately wrought, verbally and conceptually dazzling, Shelley Jackson's first novel is an imaginative and touching portrait of two lives in a cleft world yearning for wholeness -- a world not unlike our own.

Review

"Half Life is a humane and heartfelt book...often goofy, always ingenious and sometimes magical." Los Angeles Times

Review

"Jackson has imagination to burn, and her writing, strange as it is, stuns." Library Journal

Review

"A clever and surprisingly moving exploration of identity and connectedness." Booklist

Review

"Jackson's prose is stunning....Half-Life is a complex and often difficult book that is also quite funny and compelling." Balitmore Sun

Review

"[A]n extraordinarily rich offering. Sexual identity, personal identity, national identity...the lonely heart of the human condition gets deliciously disturbing and daring treatment." Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Review

"This is an athletic reading experience, exhilarating and sometimes exhausting. Jackson keeps the pace going with needle-sharp injections of wit." Newsday

Review

"Half Life is a humane and heartfelt book...often goofy, always ingenious and sometimes magical." Los Angeles Times

About the Author

Shelley Jackson is the author of the short-story collection The Melancholy of Anatomy, the author of the hypertext novel Patchwork Girl, several children's books, and "Skin," a story published in tattoos on the skin of nearly three thousand volunteers. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

5 1

What Our Readers Are Saying

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Average customer rating 5 (1 comments)

`
eanderson , September 04, 2006
It hardly does this novel justice to call it densely layered. It can be read as a satire of identity politics, a meditation on semiotics, a critique of the nuclear age, a murder mystery (of sorts), a love story -- that's just for starters. Readers who have dipped a toe into post-structural theory should put this novel on their desert island reading list -- there's plenty to occupy them here. But the story is so firmly grounded in the visceral and emotional that readers in search of an un-deserted beach read won't be disappointed either. Comparisons to Nabokov are both inevitable -- the novel's first line pays homage to Lolita's opening -- and apt, as Jackson shares her predecessor's preoccupation with ambiguities of identity, authority, and signification, as well as all the opportunities for wordplay and symbology that these themes present. There are also shades of Delillo, Pynchon, and some sly references to Eliot. But Jackson's voice is also very much her own -- cynical, relentless, and very funny.

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Product Details

ISBN:
9780060882358
Binding:
Hardcover
Publication date:
07/01/2006
Publisher:
HARPERCOLLINS PUBLISHERS
Pages:
448
Height:
9 in.
Width:
6 in.
Thickness:
1.37 in.
Grade Range:
General/trade
Number of Units:
1
UPC Code:
2800060882350
Author:
Shelley Jackson
Subject:
Conjoined twins

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List Price:0.00
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This title in other editions

  • New, Trade Paperback, $16.95
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