Edward Carey (novelist)
Encyclopedia
Edward Carey is a playwright, and novelist. He has written several adaptations for the stage, including Patrick Süskind
’s The Pigeon, and Robert Coover’s Pinocchio in Venice. His own plays include Sulking Thomas, and Captain of the Birds. He collaborated with Eddin Khoo, on the wayang kulit translation of Macbeth called Macbeth in the Shadows.
He attended the University of Iowa
International Writing Program
and taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop
. He is married to the writer Elizabeth McCracken
.
He is represented by Isobel Dixon at Blake Friedman.
Patrick Süskind
Patrick Süskind is a German writer and screenwriter.- Life and work :The public knows little about Patrick Süskind. He has withdrawn from the literary scene in Germany and never grants interviews or allows photos. He was born in Ambach am Starnberger See, near Munich in Germany...
’s The Pigeon, and Robert Coover’s Pinocchio in Venice. His own plays include Sulking Thomas, and Captain of the Birds. He collaborated with Eddin Khoo, on the wayang kulit translation of Macbeth called Macbeth in the Shadows.
He attended the University of Iowa
University of Iowa
The University of Iowa is a public state-supported research university located in Iowa City, Iowa, United States. It is the oldest public university in the state. The university is organized into eleven colleges granting undergraduate, graduate, and professional degrees...
International Writing Program
International Writing Program
The International Writing Program is a writing residency for international artists in Iowa City, Iowa. Since its inception in 1967, the IWP has hosted over 1,100 emerging and established poets, novelists, dramatists, essayists, and journalists from more than 120 countries...
and taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop
Iowa Writers' Workshop
The Program in Creative Writing, more commonly known as the Iowa Writers' Workshop, at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, Iowa, is a highly regarded graduate-level creative writing program in the United States...
. He is married to the writer Elizabeth McCracken
Elizabeth McCracken
Elizabeth McCracken is an American author.McCracken, a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, was born in Boston, Massachusetts, graduated from Newton North High School in Newton, Massachusetts, earned a B.A. and M.A. in English from Boston University, an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa, and...
.
He is represented by Isobel Dixon at Blake Friedman.
Reviews
Through Edward Carey seems to intend his first novel, Observatory Mansions, to be an unsentimental, surrealist romance, it's really a paean to loneliness. For the book is never so interesting as when its characters are despairing and alone. All goes well then for the first hundred pages, where Carey lays out the solitude housed in Observatory Mansions, a greying apartment building where Francis Orme, the book's narrator, cultivates a secret life of stillness and theft.
From Richardson to Dickens to Ackroyd, English literary fiction seems to favour the elephantine. Miniaturists – Austen, Pym perhaps, Brookner – are rarer, less typical. Edward Carey is most decidedly a miniaturist. "Miniature things move people," he remarks, two dozen pages into his second novel; and again, a similar distance from the end.
An imaginary city: this is a time for such a vision, especially for New Yorkers, whose city has always been in flux, though perhaps never more painfully and self-consciously than today. Entralla, the fictitious metropolis at the heart of Edward Carey's second novel, exists not only in our imagination and in the pages of Alva & Irva (which serves as Entralla's one and only guidebook) but in the form of tiny plasticine models of its streets and houses, seen in the appealingly smudgy photographs that punctuate the novel. A re-creation of Entralla also appears in the story of Alva & Irva, since the twins of the book's title are the designer and sculptor, respectively, of their native city in miniature.