IN & OZ
A Novel
Published on 25. April 2012
Book
Paperback/Softback
152 pages
978-0-226-80744-7 (ISBN)
Description
Steve Tomasula is a novelist like no other; his experiments in narrative and design have won him a loyal following. Exemplifying Tomasula's style, "IN & OZ" is a heady, avant-garde book, rooted in convincing characters even as it simultaneously subverts the genre of the novel and moves it forward. "IN & OZ" is a novel of art, love, and auto mechanics. The story follows five different characters - an auto designer, photographer, musical composer, poet/sculptor, and mechanic - who live in two very different places: IN, a back-alley here and now; and OZ, which reflects the desire for somewhere better. The men and women who populate Tomasula's landscape desperately hope to fill a void in their lives through a variety of media: music, language, dirt, light, and automobiles. As the plot moves forward, the story of the residents of IN and that of their counterparts in OZ converge. A fanciful allegory that tackles class relations, art, commerce, and language, "IN & OZ" is a tale of the human condition that is as visually compelling as it is moving.
A novel not only for fiction lovers, but also for artists of all stripes, "IN & OZ" creates a fantasy that illumines our own world as it lucidly builds its own.
A novel not only for fiction lovers, but also for artists of all stripes, "IN & OZ" creates a fantasy that illumines our own world as it lucidly builds its own.
Reviews / Votes
"Not very far in the future, things are a lot like now only more so.... The walls of class do not fall, though, in this eccentric but worthy descendant of Huxley's fatally bittersweet Brave New World." (Booklist) "The author's signature intelligence, at once quirky, mannered, uncanny, removed, and satiric, continues to manifest itself in spades.... IN & OZ bears a family resemblance to Orwell's Animal Farm in its political awareness and fabulist inclination, Barthelme's Dead Father in its stylized absurdity and abstract intellect, and Diderot's Rameau's Nephew in its fusion of cool aesthetic contemplation and fictive techniques." (American Book Review)"More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Chicago
United States
Publishing group
The University of Chicago Press
Dimensions
Height: 21 mm
Width: 12 mm
Thickness: 1 mm
Weight
170 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-226-80744-7 (9780226807447)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Person
Steve Tomasula is the author of a number of novels, including The Book of Portraiture and VAS: An Opera in Flatland, also published by the University of Chicago Press. He teaches fiction writing and twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature at the University of Notre Dame. A Howard Fellow, he lives in Chicago, where he is completing a novel about extinction.