Often comic, sometimes tender, profoundly truthful, the pleasure in these nonfiction pieces by award-winning novelist Joseph Skibell is discovering along with the author that catastrophes, fantasies, and delusions are what give sweetness and shape to our lives.
"As a writer," Skibell has said, "I feel about life the way the people of the Plains felt about the buffalo: I want to use every part of it." In My Father's Guitar and Other Imaginary Things, his first nonfiction work, he mines the events of his own life to create a captivating collection of personal essays, a suite of intimate stories that blurs the line between funny and poignant, and between the imaginary and the real.
Often improbable, these stories are 100 percent true. Skibell misremembers the guitar his father promised him; together, he and a telemarketer dream of a better world; a major work of Holocaust art turns out to have been painted by his cousin. Woven together, the stories paint a complex portrait of a man and his family: a businessman father and an artistic son and the difficult love between them; complicated uncles, cousins, and sisters; a haunted house; and-of course-an imaginary guitar.
Skibell's novels have been praised as "startlingly original" (the Washington Post), "magical" (the New Yorker), and the work of "a gifted, committed imagination" (the New York Times). With his distinctive style, he has been referred to as "the bastard love child of Mark Twain, I. B. Singer, and Wes Anderson, left on a doorstep in Lubbock, Texas."
Often comic, sometimes tender, profoundly truthful, and often improbable, the stories in these nonfiction essays by award-winning novelist Joseph Skibell are 100 percent true, painting a complex portrait of a man and his family--a businessman father and an artistic son and the difficult love between them; complicated uncles, cousins, and sisters; a haunted house; and, of course, an imaginary guitar--and illustrating that catastrophes, fantasies, and delusions are what give sweetness and shape to our lives. Possessing "a gifted, committed imagination" (New York Times), Joseph Skibell is the author of three novels, A Blessing on the Moon, The English Disease, and A Curable Romantic; the forthcoming collection of nonfiction stories My Father's Guitar and Other Imaginary Things; and another forthcoming nonfiction work, Six Memos from the Last Millennium: A Novelist Reads the Talmud. He has received numerous awards, including the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Sami Rohr Award in Jewish Literature, Story magazine's Short Short-Story Prize, and the Turner Prize for First Fiction.
As director of the Richard Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature from 2008 to 2015, he sang and played guitar onstage with both Margaret Atwood and Paul Simon. A professor at Emory University, Skibell has also taught at the University of Wisconsin and the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas. Recently a Senior Fellow at the Bill and Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry, he is the Winship Distinguished Research Professor in the Humanities at Emory University. A native Texan, he lives mostly in his head. CONTENTS
My Father's Guitar & Other Imaginary Things 1
International Type of Guy 11
If You Were Smiths 21
Call Morris 29
The Hank Williams Songbook 51
Sex Lives of Our Children 55
Snip Snip Snip 69
Paul McCartney's Phone Number 87
Irvin in Wonderland 89
Get Your Feet Back on the Ground 105
Absolute Elsewhere 109
Don't Mess with Mister In Between 117
Pre-Sweetened without Sugar 129
Wooden Nickels 133
Everybody's Lot 159
Ten Faces 175 "[ Joseph Skibell is] a bit of a wise shaman sharing his gently amusing, offbeat life lessons. There's something unusually endearing and
