A01=Sergio de la Pava
adversity
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
Author_Sergio de la Pava
automatic-update
career
Category1=Fiction
Category=FA
Category=FBA
character driven
childhood
colombia
colombian
coming of age
contemporary
COP=United States
court
courtroom
crime
culture
dark humor
david foster wallace
defender
delilo
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
drama
dramatic
empathy
eq_bestseller
eq_fiction
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_modern-contemporary
eq_nobargain
funny
gaddis
growing up
heist
humor
immigrants
immigration
judge
jury
justice
Language_English
law
lawyer
melville
modern
noir
novel
PA=Available
page turner
Price_€10 to €20
PS=Active
psyche
psychology
public
public defender
pynchon
real world
realistic
self esteem
softlaunch
south america
struggles
suspenseful
trial
Product details
- ISBN 9780226141794
- Publication Date: 19 Apr 2012
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
- Language: English
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The University of Chicago Press doesn't generally publish new American fiction. But last winter we started hearing from people we trusted about a stunning debut novel that no trade house had been willing to take a chance on-to the point that the author had given up and self-published it. We got a copy, and we were blown away. It's not hard to see why publishers would be scared off by this book: it's a 700-page first novel by a nobody with no connections. But what's a university press for if not to publish books we believe in that don't necessarily fit into the hit machine? And we believe in this book: it's an epoch-defining kind of novel, and the announcement of a once-in-a-generation kind of talent. "A Naked Singularity" is about Casi, a child of Colombian immigrants who lives in Brooklyn and works in Manhattan as a public defender - one who, tellingly, has never lost a trial. Never. In the book, we watch what happens when his sense of justice and even his sense of self begin to crack - and how his world then slowly devolves.
It's a huge, ambitious novel clearly in the vein of DeLillo, Foster Wallace, Pynchon, and even Melville, and it's told in a distinct, frequently hilarious voice, with a striking human empathy at its center. Its panoramic reach takes readers through crime and courts, immigrant families and urban blight, media savagery and media satire, scatology and boxing, and even a breathless heist worthy of any crime novel. If "Infinite Jest" stuck a pin in the map of mid-90s culture and drew its trajectory from there, "A Naked Singularity" does the same for the feeling of surfeit, brokenness, and exhaustion that permeates our civic and cultural life today. In the opening sentence of William Gaddis' "A Frolic of His Own", a character sneers, "Justice? You get justice in the next world. In this world, you get the law." "A Naked Singularity" reveals the extent of that gap, and lands firmly on the side of those who are forever getting the law.
Sergio De La Pava is a writer who does not live in Brooklyn.
