Description:
A darkly funny and profoundly moving new novel by award-winning author Patrick Cottrell.
And who did I think I was, trying to teach the troubled youth how to write?...
I would say I was Dan Moran, a Korean adoptee, single, approaching forty, once plain-in-appearance as a woman, now ugly as a man, that's who or what I thought I was.
Most importantly, I was no longer useless, I was a writer.
Five years after the death of his youngest brother, Dan Moran is now the published trans author of the autofictional novel Sorry to Disrupt the Peace. He is teaching fiction in Brooklyn and working on his next book-a psychological thriller-when a mysterious envelope arrives for him in the mail. Addressed to the wrong name, it includes a childhood photo of his deceased brother. But who would send such a thing, and why?
Against his better judgment, Dan returns to his childhood home on the eve of his brother's memorial dinner. His estranged family is surprised to see him, but he ignores them. He drives around in his brother's Honda Accord, believing he is a detective. He searches for a constellation of unidentified women who may have been involved with his brother, all while being mistaken for another man. He hopes his investigation will reveal exactly who he was to his brother, but in a series of unsettling and destabilizing encounters, what he discovers is the irrevocable distance between who we are and how we are perceived.
Afternoon Hours of a Hermit is Patrick Cottrell's long-awaited second novel--an existential noir, an absurd comedy, a complex character study, and a heartbreaking inquiry into the paradox of identity, memory, and the very enterprise of writing fiction.
Brief description:
Patrick Cottrell is the author of Sorry to Disrupt the Peace. He is the winner of a Whiting Award in fiction in 2018 and a Barnes & Noble Discover Award in 2017. Cottrell is currently an assistant professor at the University of Denver.
Review Quotes:
"The new book relentlessly reconfigures the first book, adding new perspective and meaning... Afternoon Hours [of a Hermit] is the work of an older, wiser Cottrell with more self-knowledge and empathy...it is glorious." - Deb Olin Unferth, BOOKFORUM
"Part of the thrill of Cottrell's work is the way he subverts expectation, leans into digression . . . Cottrell is a genius of misdirection, and the surprise pleasures of these moments feel like watching Magic Johnson make a no-look pass." - Halle Butler, Interview
"Afternoon Hours of a Hermit has the same dizzying creative energy that propelled Michael Chabon's classic sophomore novel, Wonder Boys... remarkably gripping, full of humor and unexpected twists. This striking novel cements Cottrell as a true rising star of the literary moment." - BookPage, starred review
"Cottrell is adept at the kind of claustrophobic first-person narration that brings the reader so close to his protagonists that we feel we are perceiving the world from directly behind their eyes...Cottrell's books are less concerned with character development than they are with the question of how to carry on living despite having many reasons not to... [Afternoon Hours of a Hermit] serves as a rousing reminder to all queer and trans people, to all the freaks: Be inappropriately emotional, be overwhelming, be abrasive, be weird, be pathetic. Point to the uncomfortable and the unjust. Disrupt the peace at every chance you get. It could be the only way for us to go on living." - Xtra
"Touching, quick-witted, and often very funny, Afternoon Hours of a Hermit is a sly identity break of a novel." - Our Culture
"Afternoon Hours of a Hermit is prescient and captivating, hilarious and horrifying.
A book that enchants and entices and enrages is a rare thing; Patrick Cottrell has once
again solidified his prose as knowing, and generous, and vicious, and tender." - Bryan Washington, author of Palaver, National Book Award finalist
"While reading Afternoon Hours of a Hermit, I was rapt, jolted, and thrilled.
I lost count of how many times I paused to reread a line, astonished by its precision, truth,
and hilarity. I have fallen irrevocably in love with this novel; I want to write it a song.
Read this book if you want to feel more alive." - R. O. Kwon, nationally bestselling author of Exhibit
"A rain-soaked neo-noir and a comedy of manners, a philosophical disquisition,
and a wrenching exploration of grief, Patrick Cottrell's Afternoon Hours of a Hermit
is the work of an extraordinarily gifted writer. It is one of the most
singular and thrilling novels I have read in years." - Katie Kitamura, author of Audition, shortlisted for the Booker Prize
"A hilarious and heart-wrenching whodunit where the central question is not who
committed murder but what, exactly, is dead. With precise and crystalline prose,
Patrick Cottrell deploys the visual and linguistic vocabulary of a noir to gripping effect.
Afternoon Hours of a Hermit is a brilliant, comedy-laden meditation
on the liquid, hard-to-capture qualities of grief." - Rita Bullwinkel, author of Headshot, Pulitzer Prize finalist
"Patrick Cottrell writes prose that is so clean, resonant, and pitch-perfect, it's like
listening to someone play the cello in a completely silent music hall. Somehow it is also
a virtuosic work of comedy. It is not an overstatement to say that
Afternoon Hours of a Hermit is a novel of genius." - Amina Cain, author of Indelicacy, Center for Fiction First Novel Prize finalist
"I loved reading the book. I loved it so much I read it in one sitting, meaning in one day. It was mildly interrupted by my mother who asked me if her overnight gifts of aloe and vita-C arrived for my post-cardioversion burns. Reading Afternoon Hours of a Hermit kept me from scratching the burns to death. So, in my view, Patrick's book works like the finest aloe vera gel, offering relief for every kind of burn--emotional, psychological, physical, and beyond!" - Vi Khi Nao, author of The Italy Letters