Description:
First published in 1972, Ann Quin's fourth and final novel was a radical break from the introspective style she had developed in Three and Passages: a declaration of independence from all expectations.
Brashly experimental, ribald, and hilarious, Tripticks maps new territories for the novel--aspiring to a form of pop art via the drawings of the artist Carol Annand and anticipating the genre-busting work of Kathy Acker through collage and gory satire.
Splattering its pages with the story of a man being chased across a nightmarish America by his "first X-wife," and her "schoolboy gigolo," Tripticks was ground zero for the collision of punk energy with high style.
Review Quotes:
"Quin's spare prose line--delphic, obscure and hauntingly suggestive--creates a comparably vertiginous kind of enchantment. To submit to this unique book's spell is to experience, in language, a 'fantastic dance of images, shapes, forms.'" --Sam Sack, Wall Street Journal
"Quin works over a small area with the finest of tools. Every page, every word gives evidence of her care and workmanship." --New York Times
"Quin's prose never falters; it's stunning." --Paris Review
"Quin was a writer ahead of her time." --Publishers Weekly
"Vividly intense and almost palpably immediate." --Irish Times
"Quin uses carefully crafted imagery to stimulate the reader's subconscious." --Booklist
"Quin tosses out hefty dashes of mordant humour and caustic wit." --Library Journal
"I suspect that Ann Quin will eventually be viewed, alongside B. S. Johnson and Alexander Trocchi, as one of the few mid-century British novelists who actually, in the long term, matter." --Tom McCarthy
"Ann Quin is a master painter of interiors, of voices that mosaic as they catch the light at strange, stirring angles." --Chloe Aridjis
"Quin's militant refusal to compromise flavours her writing: you either take her on her own terms, or not at all. Richer and stranger than the satisfactions of mainstream fiction." --Jonathan Coe
"Quin understood she was on to something new." --Deborah Levy
"One of our greatest ever novelists. Ann Quin's was a new British working-class voice that had not been heard before: it was artistic, modern, and--dare I say it--ultimately European." --Lee Rourke
"One of Britain's most adventurous post-war writers. Psychologically dark and sexually daring." --Juliet Jacques
"Rare enough is a book that begins by stating its intention--rarer still one that proceeds to do seemingly everything it can to avoid following the path its intention has laid." --Danielle Dutton