Some Trick
Thirteen Stories
Failed to add items
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wish list failed.
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
Audible Standard 1-month free trial
Some Trick
Buy Now for $18.03
-
Narrated by:
-
Tim Campbell
-
Emily Sutton-Smith
-
James Langton
-
Karen Cass
-
Written by:
-
Helen DeWitt
Hailed a “Best Book of the Year” by NPR, Publishers Weekly, Vulture, and the New York Public Library
Finalist for the 2019 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction
For sheer unpredictable brilliance, Gogol may come to mind, but no author alive today takes a listener as far as Helen DeWitt into the funniest, most yonder dimensions of possibility. Her jumping-off points might be statistics, romance, the art world’s piranha tank, games of chance and games of skill, the travails of publishing, or success. “Look,” a character begins to explain, laying out some gambit reasonably enough, even if facing a world of boomeranging counterfactuals, situations spinning out to their utmost logical extremes, and Rube Goldberg-like moving parts, where things prove “more complicated than they had first appeared” and “at 3 a.m. the circumstances seem to attenuate.” In various ways, each tale carries DeWitt’s signature poker-face lament regarding the near-impossibility of the life of the mind when one is made to pay to have the time for it, in a world so sadly “taken up with all sorts of paraphernalia superfluous, not to say impedimental, to ratiocination.”
©2018 Helen DeWitt (P)2018 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.