ARTISTS CHOICE #19 BUNDLE - Ryan Davis & Gerald Murnane

$50.00

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THIS IS THE BUNDLE FOR OUR ARTISTS CHOICE BOOK CLUB #19*
LP** $35 / Book $20 - Bundle $50 (save $5!)

Ryan Davis has chosen the book 'Barley Patch' by Gerald Murnane

to pair with their new LP 'New Threats From The Soul'.

From Davis: "Gerald Murnane is an Australian writer whom I'd never heard of until this past year or so. I think it was actually your (NC's) very own Nathan Bowles who first hipped me to him and, like, immediately after, several other friends randomly made the same suggestion independently of one another. So it became almost this game of walking into every book store we went to on tour, gazing around for his titles, and consistently striking out for about a year straight. But, to be honest, I kind of enjoy a game like that, so I refused to buy anything online and did eventually come across his work at a small boutique shop in Bristol, UK this past spring. Barley Patch was the one they had so that's what I grabbed without really knowing the first thing about it.

This book of "fiction" (to what extent it is that, I'm not exactly sure, as it reads fairly auto-biographically) was Murnane's return to novel form following a nearly 15-year hiatus from fiction writing. Written as one long, splendidly brakeless soliloquy centered around answering the ultimate question of "Must I write?" (posed by Rainer Maria Rilke in the novel's earliest pages), among others. As a person who grew up with various 'learning disabilities' that prevented the act of reading literature to be in any way enjoyable until considerably later in life, I found Murnane's retelling of his own inventively distracting self-involvement as a neuro-misbehaved reader of fiction to be both relatable and fascinating.

Memory, cognition, obsession, wreckless imagination, existential blur, bending narrative focus and universal truths to the point of breaking them... These are all things that, on an active daily basis, I am not only interested in but uniquely challenged by. Barley Patch - a book about all of them and then some - is itself as much an attention-racking ropeadope to keep up with as it is a generous wonder to try."