Generation Loss
Elizabeth Handfiction / literary thriller
trade cloth · 978-1-931520-21-8 · $24 · April 2007-- Buy
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-- MobipocketCass Neary made her name in the 1970s as a photographer embedded in the burgeoning punk movement in New York City. Her pictures of the musicians and hangers on, the infamous, the damned, and the dead, got her into art galleries and a book deal. But thirty years later she is adrift, on her way down, and almost out. Then an old acquaintance sends her on a mercy gig to interview a famously reclusive photographer who lives on an island in Maine. When she arrives Downeast, Cass stumbles across a decades-old mystery that is still claiming victims, and into one final shot at redemption.
generation loss: the loss of quality between subsequent copies of data, such as sound recordings, video, or photographs.
- Read the first chapter.
- Read a later excerpt.
- Watch an interview.
Elizabeth Hand's new novel has been picked up by Small Beer Press and Harcourt Harvest in a co-publishing deal reminiscent of Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife. Small Beer Press will publish Generation Loss in hardcover in April 2007 followed a year later by Harcourt Harvest's paperback edition.
Reviews + Quotes
"Cass is a marvel, someone with whom we take the difficult journey toward delayed adulthood, wishing her encouragement despite grave odds."
-- Los Angeles Times"Hand’s terse but transporting prose keeps the reader turning pages until Neary’s gritty charm does, finally, shine through." (B)
-- Entertainment Weekly* "Hand (Mortal Love) explores the narrow boundary between artistic genius and madness in this gritty, profoundly unsettling literary thriller."
-- Publishers Weekly (starred review)"A riveting page-turner."
-- Valley Advocate"The novel crackles with energy: it is alive."
-- Nicholas Rombes, (The Ramones and New Punk Cinema)"Intense and atmospheric, Generation Loss is an inventive brew of postpunk attitude and dark mystery. Elizabeth Hand writes with craftsmanship and passion."
-- George Pelecanos"Lucid and beautifully rendered. Great, unforgiving wilderness, a vanished teenager, an excellent villain, and an obsession with art that shades into death: what else do you need? An excellent book."
-- Brian Evenson, The Open CurtainOn the web:
- Elizabeth Hand's site
- Bookslut interview
- Interview on YouTube.
- Music for Generation Loss on Largehearted Boy.
- Jeff VanderMeer explains that Liz Hand is actually a saint. This may have come as a surprise to Liz, but not to the citizens (subjects? artifices?) of Smagardine.
Credits
- Cover images © Jacob McMurray.
- Author photo © Norm Walters.
- Download cover for print.
- Download author photo for print.
Note: An excerpt from this book appeared in 2005 in Gargoyle 50, edited by Lucinda Ebersole and Richard Peabody.
Camera Lucida: Reflections On Photography by Roland Barthes, translation by Richard Howard, translation copyright 1981 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc.
" sister morphine" from Babel by Patti Smith, copyright © 1978 by Patti Smith. Used by permission of G.P. Putnam’s Sons, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
