The Art of Failing: Notes from the Underdog

by Anthony McGowan

Overview

An Observer book of the year

HAUNTED! By endless tiny humiliations.

STRUGGLING! To resurrect the corpse of his literary career.

ENSNARED! In a loving yet bamboozling marriage.

A man at odds with the universe, Anthony McGowan stumbles from one improbable fiasco to the next. On the mean streets of West Hampstead he reflects upon all that is at the heart of life itself – socks with holes, underwhelming packed lunches, broken washing machines, Kierkegaard, liver salts, British Library eccentricities and disapproving ladies on trains. In this chronicle of one man’s daily failures and disappointments, McGowan can’t help but speak his mind – with cringeworthy and hilarious results.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781786073549
Publisher:	Oneworld Publications
Publication date:	10/09/2018
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.80(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Anthony McGowan is one of the most widely acclaimed young adult and children’s authors in the UK. His books have won numerous major awards. In 2020, he was awarded the CILIP Carnegie Medal for Lark. He was also shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal with Rook and won the Booktrust Teenage Prize and the Catalyst Award for Henry Tumour. His YA novel The Knife that Killed Me was made into a critically-lauded film in 2014. Anthony lives in London, with his wife, two children and dog.

Editorial Reviews

2017-08-07
A British fiction writer humorously chronicles the quotidian frustrations, discomforts, and outright failures he faced over the course of one year.In this sometimes-scattershot but often hilarious collection, McGowan (Rook, 2017, etc.) recounts the details of his life as a husband, father, and North London writer. Organized as a series of titled journal entries, the narrative explores the strangeness and banality of everyday life and, in particular, its often laughable embarrassments. In "I Love You," the author describes the unusual events that led him to accidentally put a banana on which he'd written "I love you" in front of a man sitting near him at the British Library. His eye ever on the bizarre, McGowan also tells the story of encountering his double in a dwarf who "propelled himself with crutches along the pavement, at high speed" and seemed to exist to offer the author a "cryptic message" he never actually delivered. In reflecting on his career as a writer, he recalls an interview he did with Anthony Burgess that "went like a dream" but ended in disaster when he later realized he had failed to turn on his tape recorder. McGowan's family life is a rich source of material for his entries. Whether he is recounting his neighborhood adventures with Monty, a "dog blessed more with irascibility than intelligence," musing at how he ever could have ended up with as sensible, successful, and beautiful a wife as his "Mrs. McG," or wondering at the softness of his M&S woolen socks and whether they make him too "content with the state of the world," McGowan always brings a quirky and refreshing perspective. Though the meandering plotlessness becomes irksome, the author's delight in unearthing the overlooked pain points of everyday life and laughing at them makes up for the fractured, willy-nilly nature of the narrative. Entertaining reading to dip into now and then.

Kirkus Reviews