Private Novelist

by Nell Zink

Overview

From the brilliant and incisive author of Mislaid—"a writer of extraordinary talent and range" (Jonathan Franzen) whose "capacity for inventions is immense" (BookForum)—comes a new collection of her earliest work: two wildly funny novellas (Sailing Towards the Sunset by Avner Shats and European Story for Avner Shats) available in one compact volume.

Years ago, Nell Zink resolved to write a book for her friend, the Israeli novelist Avner Shats, that would mirror his remarkable style. Unable to read his Hebrew, she was forced to start from scratch. Now, this tongue-in-cheek homage is available to Nell’s growing readership for the first time, accompanied by a second dazzling and imaginative work that breathes—at Shats’s request—the perfumed air of the Old Europe and stars a figure very much like Shats.

Sailing Towards the Sunset by Avner Shats is Zink’s faux-translation of Shats’s 1998 novel Lashut El Hashkia ("Sailing Towards the Sunset"). It flows with a narrative spin only the singular Zink could pull off—including both authentic and fictional versions of characters from Shats’s life and work such as the author herself.

A fast-moving portrait of expat artists, authors, and academics on fellowships at the Villa Romana in Florence, European Story for Avner Shats centers on a trio of three indelible characters: an Israeli writer vaguely reminiscent of Shats, a German specialist in ancient lint, and a beautiful and fraudulent Russian performance artist.

Demonstrating the hallmarks of Zink’s unique talent, Private Novelist is an intimate look into this acclaimed novelist’s early work that will please her coterie of admirers and further burnish her lustrous reputation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062458308
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	10/04/2016
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Nell Zink grew up in rural Virginia. She has worked in a variety of trades, including masonry and technical writing. In the early 1990s, she edited an indie rock fanzine. Her books include The Wallcreeper, Mislaid, Private Novelist, and Nicotine, and her writing has appeared in n+1, Granta, and Harper’s. She lives near Berlin, Germany.

Editorial Reviews

08/15/2016
In this surprising and entertaining metafictional experiment, Zink attempts to translate the Israeli author Avner Shats’s 1998 novel, Sailing Towards the Sunset, from the original Hebrew, despite not being able to read the language (she bases her translation on a synopsis given to her by Shats). The result is a fractured narrative about an Israeli spy, Yigal, who while on a mission meets and impregnates Mary, a mythical sea creature called a silkie. Interspersed with literary criticism, “irrelevant interludes,” and copied-and-pasted email correspondence with Avner Shats himself, the novel winds to a kind of conclusion in which the author literally writes herself into the narrative to help Yigal and Mary dispose of a bomb. An appended short story, “European Story for Avner Shats,” about three artists on a fellowship in Florence, is slightly less scattered, and much more of a lark. Initially written in three weeks’ time and for Shats’s eyes only, the writing can be at times pleasingly uninhibited, at other times recklessly dashed off. It’s a tension that strangely fits this eccentric book, in style and in substance, binding its disparate parts together. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

Readers who enjoy smart, playful postmodernism will be glad that Private Novelist has finally been made public. Proof that experimental fiction can be fun.” — Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

2016-07-20
Early work by the acclaimed author of Nicotine (2016), Mislaid (2015), and Wallcreeper (2014).“It having become apparent that I should write a novel, my next concern became which novel I should write. An obvious choice was Avner Shats’ recent debut, Sailing Toward the Sunset.” Thus begins Sailing Toward the Sunset by Avner Shats, which comprises the first half of this idiosyncratic (obviously) book. There’s an explanatory (sort of) foreword by the aforementioned Shats, and something like an account of how this peculiar work came to be is proffered by the narrator. Here’s the idea: an admirer of Zink’s writing, Shats encouraged her to write a novel. She responded by sending him her translation of his own novel—a chapter each day—during the month of December 1998. Zink (or the first-person narrator who may or may not be the author) is undaunted by the fact that she can’t read Hebrew (the language in which Shats wrote his novel), and she gets going by questioning the very concept of translation. What is ostensibly an English edition of a story about an Israeli spy turns, before it begins, into autobiography (or faux autobiography), a critique of trends in contemporary “literary” fiction, a consideration of the epistolary novel, and a short story interlude—and that’s just the first four chapters. “European Story for Avner Shats”—which makes up the second part of Private Novelist—is (or so we are told) a writing exercise inspired by prompts provided by Shats. It begins with the following declaration: “This story will be composed in bad English.” Zink earned critical acclaim with her debut, The Wallcreeper, and she made the National Book Award longlist with Mislaid (2015). Private Novelist would never have been published without those successes (no less a personage than Jonathan Franzen tried, and failed, to sell the manuscript). This is not an indictment. Readers who enjoy smart, playful postmodernism will be glad that Private Novelist has finally been made public.Proof that experimental fiction can be fun.

Kirkus Reviews