Shame

by Grant Maierhofer

Overview

Shame is a daring exploration of the potential and limits of memory and self. Here we meet Grant Maierhofer at various points within his life then, now, and in the future as he investigates the sense of shame that haunts the course of his days. The real and unreal, fact and fiction, blur together in a Kaufmanesque sequence of overlapping narratives about who we really are, how we cope with regret, and the repetitions of our behavior.

Through lists, fragments, recollections, and rants, the story of a son’s vexing grief for his father emerges. A sober addict trying to figure out how to navigate pleasure, diversion, and escape. A father trying to figure out marriage, children, maturity, and responsibility. A confused observer in a world constantly torn apart by media, politics, and aggression. A meditation on the nature of art, and art’s place in contemporary life.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781573668965
Publisher:	University of Alabama Press
Publication date:	09/12/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	152
File size:	662 KB

About the Author

Grant Maierhofer is author of Drain Songs, Peripatet, Works, and others.
 

Table of Contents

Contents In the Time When the Americans Decided Certain Things Were Thus In the Time When My Memory Fixated on the Death of Princess Diana In the Time of Paternity and the Volvo 240 Wagon In the Time of Death In the Time of Grant Maierhofer, Old and Sick

Editorial Reviews

At a time when the novel seems caught between the twin pillars of autofiction and agitprop, Grant Maierhofer’s Shame brings us something new. Working in the tradition of Beckett, or Bernhard, Maierhofer cuts his self-loathing with tenderness, with melancholy, with deadpan wit and vulnerability. The result is a book that feels unlike any other I can think of: supple, kaleidoscopic, at once intimate and vast. A novel that seems—somehow—practically infinite.”
—Matthew Specktor, author of American Dream Machine and Always Crashing in the Same Car
 
“It’s like Kafka’s cockroach. It’s like Stephen Daedalus yammering metaphysics. It’s like Robert Lowell’s ill spirit sobbing. It’s like Henry Miller stumble drunk. It’s like Kerouac in Mexico, wild, undisciplined, pure, the crazier the better. Thus the sordid erudition and crazy wisdom of Grant Maierhofer’s Shame.”
—Curtis White, author of Living in a World That Can't Be Fixed
 
“Naked, wry, obsessed with loss, fear, existential shock before our hyperbolic now, Grant Maierhofer’s Shame is a stunning innovative serpent ever in the act of swallowing its own wounded, hyperaware tail and tale, reminding us on every page that nonfiction is nothing if not a troubled and troubling suburb of fiction where the self can honestly be told only in a series of jittery approximations.”
—Lance Olsen, author of Skin Elegies
 

“Alternately raw, fiery, poetic, and sentimental, the author’s take can . . . show levity, as when describing tender moments with his wife . . .  when Maierhofer’s cathartic ruminations hit, they hit hard.”
—Publisher’s Weekly
 

From the Publisher