Supermodel

by David Breskin

Overview

David Breskin may have written the world’s first self-contextualizing turbo-novel, or turbo-poem if you prefer. An intricate machine, Supermodel generates a wild ride: the headlong velocity and eyestunning detail of its story, the force of its situations, and the veracity of its characters will seize and pull you from front to back fast enough for thrills, chills, and bouts of epistemological whiplash. The story’s framing device--an injured supermodel stranded by a tsunami in a palm tree, her fiancé’s whereabouts unknown--uses Petra Nemcova’s famous predicament as its point of departure and its avenue of ingress into a richly invented character: a supremely beautiful woman treading her beauty’s way into the world. Speeding at you in a single extended sentence, this story is paired, in parallel italicized couplets, with a running commentary Breskin has extracted from the endless bubbling fountain of the Internet. This cyber-Greek chorus (presenting voices ranging from the Department of Defense to the Vagina Institute, from lad mags to cosmologists) is frequently hilarious when not terrifying. Sometimes a stand-in for the noise of the world, but more often a torrent of the unexpected and the mindbogglingly apt, this flow pours into and around our heroine’s story to make a whole that is, somehow and all at once, sympathetic and satiric, profound and profane. An intertwined and twinning lattice, in which fact and fiction outdo each other in a festival of the improbable and the unassailably so, Supermodel presents the world we know, rendered in a form we have neither seen before nor anticipated. And yet, we recognize it the instant we find it in front of us, right there, living, on the page: the first epic poem of the Internet Age.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781483598369
Publisher:	BookBaby
Publication date:	01/01/2006
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	200
File size:	369 KB

About the Author

David Breskin first made his name in the 1980s and early ’90s as a freelance journalist, writing for national magazines, most prominently, Rolling Stone, where he was a contributing editor. After publishing a novel, The Real Life Diary of a Boomtown Girl, Breskin turned away from journalism and toward poetry, and by the mid-1990s had begun publishing poems in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Parnassus, New American Writing, and TriQuarterly, among other periodicals. His first book of poetry, Fresh Kills, was published in 1997, and his second, Escape Velocity, in 2004. His next work, Supermodel was a one-sentence epic poem, or novel-in-verse.

Breskin has also worked as a record producer for the past thirty-five years and, in addition to Frisell and Cline, has collaborated with leading-edge musicians beginning with John Zorn, Ronald Shannon Jackson, Vernon Reid, and Joey Baron in the ’80s and early ’90s, and continuing with Mary Halvorson, Kris Davis, Craig Taborn, and Chris Lightcap in the current decade. He lives in San Francisco. Most of his work may be found at davidbreskin.com.