Description:
"Mays's passion for art electrifies fascinating sketches of Beuys." -Quill and Quire
A brooding fugitive hides out in a crumbling hotel that was once filled with celebrities enjoying the successes of postwar America. He is a racist with a criminal past, an anti-hero who reflects on the ruins of the South and simultaneously on the life of a German performance artist called "Jupp". The fictional Jupp is a thinly-veiled cipher for the late real-life German artist, Joseph Beuys, and the photos in the novel are photos of the performances by the controversial Beuys. At once echoing the moody worlds of W. G. Sebald and incorporating outrageous elements of pulp fiction, this novel of dark romanticism is not for optimists seeking redemption, but for those willing to take a look into a searing heart of darkness.
Review Quotes:
Anne Collins is the publisher of the Knopf Random Canada Publishing Group, which includes the imprints Knopf Canada and Random House Canada; she has been a vice president of the company that is now Penguin Random House Canada since 1998. What that role means is that she is responsible for the publishing careers of about 350 Canadian authors of fiction and non-fiction, as well as publishing close roughly 175 international authors whose work is of particular interest to Canadian readers. Mays was born in rural Louisiana in 1941. Both his parents died when he was a child, his father in a car accident and his mother of cancer, and he was raised thereafter by relatives in Shreveport. He studied medieval literature and literary criticism at the University of Rochester, and moved to Toronto in 1969 to accept a teaching job at York University. He married Margaret Cannon in 1971, and published his first novel, The Spiral Stair, in 1978. He joined The Globe and Mail in 1980. In 1994 he published Emerald City: Toronto Visited, a collection of essays about Toronto architecture and history. The following year he published In the Jaws of the Black Dogs, a memoir of his lifelong struggle with clinical depression. In the book, he also came out as bisexual by orientation, although he noted that for personal and religious reasons he had chosen to remain monogamously married to his wife rather than exploring his attractions to men. In 1997 he published Power in the Blood, a memoir about exploring his family history after the death of his aunt Vandalia in 1990. The book was shortlisted for that year's Viacom Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction. The following year he left The Globe and Mail to become a general arts and culture journalist for the National Post, remaining with that paper until 2001. In 2002 he published Arrivals: Stories from the History of Ontario, a book about Ontario history. The book won the Joseph Brant Award from the Ontario Historical Society. He was a freelance writer for a variety of publications in this era, until rejoining The Globe and Mail in 2008 as an architecture columnist. Over the course of his career in journalism, he won awards from both the National Newspaper Awards and the National Magazine Awards. He also taught courses and gave guest lectures on architecture at OCAD University and the University of Toronto. Mays died of a heart attack on September 16, 2016 in Toronto, just two weeks after having completed writing his second novel, The Occidental Hotel. Richard Rhodes is the author of twenty-six books including The Making of the Atomic Bomb, which won a Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction, a National Book Award and a National Book Critics Circle Award; Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, which was shortlisted for a Pulitzer Prize in History; and two further volumes of nuclear history. His latest book, Energy: A Human History, was published by Simon & Schuster in May 2018. Rhodes has received numerous fellowships for research and writing, including grants from the Ford Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. He has been a visiting scholar at Harvard, MIT and Stanford and a host and correspondent for documentaries on American public television. With his wife, Dr. Ginger Rhodes, a clinical psychologist, he lives above Half Moon Bay, California.