A Crash Course On the Anatomy of Robots

by Kent Evans

Overview

Damien Wood's path to adulthood in the last decade of the 20th century is marked with effortless success--creative, financial, sexual. Yet his half-Asian lineage with its inherent cultural clashes is coupled with the inability to be touched by feelings or the people around him. Damien's efforts to reach his inner self take him from place to place and one hollow relationship to another, but he remains stuck outside of his experiences, a robot convincingly playing the role of daredevil artist and globetrotter.Then, the century turns. As Damien's mother dies after a long and agonizing illness, and 9/11 inaugurates a reign of fear and terror, his emotions, from desire to despair, begin to emerge unbidden. These birth pangs of humanity send Damien on a mordantly comic, darkly suspenseful quest from the Americas through Southeast Asia in the company of an expatriate colony with too little to lose - including values - until violence comes to claim him as one of its own. No longer a robot, Damien has become a wanted man.A daring hybrid of adventure, verse, and travel fiction, framed by a chronicle of self-revelation in a pitch-perfect voice for the post-millennium, this book heralds the return of a novelist of impressive literary gifts.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781938545016
Publisher:	Pangea Books
Publication date:	09/17/2012
Pages:	338
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.76(d)
Age Range:	15 Years

About the Author

Kent Evans is the author of Malas Ondas, a novel about self-destruction throughout Latin America. He was a fixture on the spoken word art scene throughout the 90's. His work has appeared in numerous national pop-culture and literary zines and publications. Kent's current artistic endeavors include performing poetry with music in a live trip/hop jazz format.

Table of Contents

A Crash Course on Using the Manual 1

Prologue 5

The Uncanny Valley (A Crash Course on Social Isolation) 7

Parents (A Crash Course on Death, Family, and Fallout 45

Portrait of an Artist as a Not So Young Man (A Crash Course on Survival) 89

Escape from New York (A Crash Course on the Anatomy of Relationships) 135

Southeast Asia on a shoestring (A Crash Course on Travel) 221

Out of the Valley (A Crash Course on Terminally Pat Open Endings) 273

Special Features: Deleted Scenes, Alternate Ending, Credits, Propaganda on the Author (Just Pretend it's a DVD Made Out of Paper) 293

Editorial Reviews

In Evans' most recent novel, Damien Wood and his expat friends discover that humanity is a fragile thing, especially when held up against the vicissitudes of a generally uncaring universe. Told largely, though not exclusively, as a collection of second-person journal entries and blog posts, the novel follows Damien's life through the first few years of the 2000s, with occasional flashbacks to his teen years and sidesteps into other, tangentially related issues. Despite several achievements in his life, including success as a writer and spoken-word artist, Damien is progressively isolated from his loved ones and from himself, and he searches for a connection via frequent travel, alcohol and an increasingly agitated series of relationships with women. By the time Damien ends up in Cambodia, drinking nearly nonstop, he's been driven to distraction by his latest female companion and seemingly endless visa issues. Events line up for a darker turn. As befitting the rapid, cross-platform nature of Damien's work and lifestyle, Evans tells the story in a rapid mishmash of stylistic devices, including poetry, fake technical instructions and shifting typographic standards, while keeping the story moving breathlessly forward. The effect becomes wearing in the middle of the narrative, but Damien remains an engaging, witty character from beginning to end. The more grandiose effects are grounded by the reader's natural sympathy for Damien, the hapless protagonist. Evans also effectively uses cultural indicators to evoke the time period without dating the material, even though references to MySpace come perilously close to bucking this trend. Readers who approach the narrative with suspicion about the central metaphor--which is understandable, given the nearly clichéd nature of the "technology dehumanizes us" trope--will likely appreciate the dexterous subtlety Evans employs to underline the theme through actions rather than baldly declaring it in dialogue or exposition. Despite a flurry of stylistic flourishes, a cleareyed character study emerges, brimming with warmth and sympathy.

Kirkus Reviews