Rudolph Wurlitzer is the author of the novels Nog, Flats, Quake, and Slow Fade, and a non-fiction book, Hard Travel to Sacred Places. He has written numerous screenplays, including Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Two Lane Blacktop, and Walker. Wurlitzer wrote the librettos to two Philip Glass operas, In the Penal Colony and The Perfect American, and co-directed the film Candy Mountain with Robert Frank.
* Time Out New York's #1 Best Book of 2008
* ForeWord Magazine Gold Medal for Literary Fiction"A picaresque
American Book of the Dead... in the tradition of Thomas Pynchon,
Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut and Terry Southern."
--David Ulin, Los Angeles Times "[A] funny, inquisitive novel
[that] asks readers to re-examine their ideas of the Western
frontier and personal freedom."
--Wall Street Journal"There's a bawdy, lunatic thrill to the tale
that seems somehow radical. It's the kind of book someone will
stick in a back pocket before heading out on the trail into the
unknown."
--LA Weekly"Wurlitzer delivers a mystic Western possessed of
anarchic charms and incantatory beauty. This furiously told legend
weaves history and myth into a riotous tale."
--Publishers Weekly, Starred Review"The most hallucinogenic Western
you'll ever catch in the movie house of your mind's eye. What
results is a genre farce with oracular power--a Queen of Hearts
sutra, a court jester's Blood Meridian. With Drop Edge, Wurlitzer
has considerably raised the stakes."
--Bookforum "Drop Edge occupies a space between the whimsical and
the mystical, the silly and the sublime. Wurlitzer's philosophical,
humorous, and visionary yarn guides the reader into a landscape in
which to wander around and get lost, a West that leads into the
numinous terra incognita between sleep and waking, life and death,
and toward the contemplation of what it means to cross a
frontier."
--LA CityBeat "In his hero, Zebulon Shook, Wurlitzer has invented a
funny, acerbic, hugely compelling representative of American
heroism. This is that rare story that improves as it expands, not
unlike another rambling picaresque, Don Quixote."
--Washington City Paper "Wurlitzer's most satisfying read to
date... should be as well known as anything by Cormac McCarthy,
Steve Erickson, or Jim Harrison. A pure blast of vituoso
storytelling. [Drop Edge] is a book that shows us our own
reflection at this exact moment in our history--America as a
flailing, undomesticated, wild-eyed, hairy brawler, with a big,
confused heart in rebellion against the coarse exigencies of
existence and civilization."
--Barnes & Noble Review "An epic Western and a summation of all
that's great about Wurlitzer's novels and film scripts... an old
hand laying down what may well be the best piece of writing he's
ever done."
--Arthur Magazine "Mesmerizing. A Western as Celine might have
written one."
--Times Literary Supplement of London "The Drop Edge of Yonder,
Wurlitzer's first novel in 24 years, is his best to date. It's the
rare book that possesses not just big ideas, but the daring
cleverness to pull them off."
--Time Out New York "An epic Western that merges the unique
narrative invention of [Wurlitzer's] early novels with the
cinematic drift of his best scripts."
--Dazed & Confused "[A] psychedelic adventure... Ruminative and
rip-roaring at once."
--Entertainment Weekly "[Wurlitzer's] vivid language has a poetic,
almost magical, intensity. An atmospheric work that fuses the road
novel and the Western. [A] Western [that] beautifully captures the
glimmering maya of a gold-and-gun-and-sex-crazed frontier."
--The Brooklyn Rail "When Rudy Wurlitzer became a novelist and
screenwriter during the 1970s, genre deconstruction was all the
rage. The Drop Edge of Yonder, based on an unproduced screenplay
from the time, is a psychedelic, fever-dream Western. When fur
trapper Zebulon accidently murders a woman, she curses him,
declaring, "From now on you will drift between worlds not knowing
if you're dead or alive, or if the unseen worlds exist or if you're
dreaming..." Readers are all the better for his misfortune.
Wurlitzer's prose is a gorgeous, blunt instrument, like riding a
bucking bronco on LSD, like if Dispatches were written by Davy
Crockett."
--Pat B., Politics and Prose Bookstore"Simply the most wonderful
book I have read all year."
--Largehearted Boy "Wurlitzer opens up his cold-blooded prose veins
with the blade of the Western genre, and something sinister and
mystically unsettling gushes out."
--Baltimore City Paper
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