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    You & Me: A Novel
    You & Me: A Novel
    You & Me: A Novel
    Ebook197 pages2 hours

    You & Me: A Novel

    By Padgett Powell

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    About this ebook

    Padgett Powell, author of the acclaimed The Interrogative Mood and “one of the few truly important American writers of our time” (Sam Lipsyte), returns with a hilarious Southern send-up of Samuel Beckett’s classic Waiting for Godot.

    Truly a master of envelope-pushing, post-postmodern American fiction, in a class with Nicholas Baker and Lydia Davis, Powell brilliantly blends the sublime, the trivial, and the oddball in You & Me, as two loquacious gents on a porch discuss all manner of subjects, from the mundane to the spiritual to the downright ridiculous.

    At once outrageously funny and profound, You & Me is yet another brilliant, boundary-bursting masterwork, proving once again that, “there are few writers who understand both the beauty and the absurdity of language as well as Padgett Powell” (Kevin Wilson, author of The Family Fang) and that, “Padgett Powell is one of the best writers in America, and one of the funniest, too” (Ian Frazier).

    You & Me: A Novel won the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction.

    Editor's Note

    Intellectual & Hilarious...

    Intellectual, poignant, & utterly hilarious, Powell’s update to Samuel Beckett's classic existential angst story is not to be missed - if for its brilliant wordplay alone.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateJul 31, 2012
    ISBN9780062126153
    You & Me: A Novel
    Author

    Padgett Powell

    Padgett Powell is the author of six novels, including Edisto, which was nominated for the National Book Award, and two collections of stories. His writing has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper's, and the Paris Review, as well as in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Sports Writing. He has received a Whiting Writers' Award, the Rome Fellowship in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. He lives in Gainesville, Florida, where he teaches at MFA@FLA, the writing program of the University of Florida.

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    • 1/5
      What if this author, who used to be pretty good, you know, now could only write a book that is an inane conversation between two old geezers about pretty much nothing?You mean theoretically?No.Oh. That's sad.Yes, it is.But aren't there any good points? I'll bet there are some good blurbs, right?One blurb compares it to Nicholson Baker.Meaning a book about nothing, or where nothing really happens? The Mezzanine?Yes, except in The Mezzanine there is quite a lot of interesting stuff.Like?What the ends of shoelaces are called.What are they called?Aglets.Cool. That is interesting.No, really, you know what I mean. You read the damned thing.That wasn't Baker, that was Bierce.I was speaking figuratively.Huh?Never mind. I'm the one who just had to read 190 some-odd pages to turn up only a few memorable phrases. Other than that, it's mainly meaningless wordplay and moaning about growing old.I could moan about that.Not for 190 some-odd pages.Probably not. What about the few memorable phrases?Well, let me see. There was something about telling Charon, "Take me down to Funky Town, my man."I'm ROTFL.You're not.Next."Failure is to success as water is to land."I'm on an island myself, surrounded by failure on all sides.Don't look at me like that. I'm not telling you the rest. Actually, as I look at them on my Kindle, they really aren't that profound.Do you feel like reading the book was largely a waste of time?Yep.So should I read it?Nope.Shall we have a drink now?More than one, my man.

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    You & Me - Padgett Powell

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