Dance Prone

Dance Prone
David Coventry
RRP:
NZ$ 53.99
Our Price:
NZ$ 44.27
Hardback
h216 x 135mm - 400pg
23 Jul 2020 UK
International import eta 7-19 days
9781509839421
Out Of Stock
Currently no stock in-store, stock is sourced to your order
During their 1985 tour, two events of hatred and stupidity forever change the lives of a band' s four members. Neues Bauen, a post-hardcore Illinois group homing in on their own small fame, head on with frontman Conrad Wells sexually assaulted and guitarist Tone Seburg wounded by gunshot. The band staggers forth into the American landscape, traversing time and investigating each of their relationships with history, memory, authenticity, violence and revelling in transcendence through the act of art. With decades passed and compelled by his wife' s failing health to track down Tone, Conrad flies to North Africa where her brother is rumoured to be hiding with a renowned artist from their past. There he instead meets various characters including his former drummer, Spence. Amongst the sprawl and shout of Morocco, the men attempt to recall what happened to them during their lost years of mental disintegration and emotional poverty. Dance Prone is a novel of music, ritual and love. It is live, tense and corporeal. Full of closely observed details of indie-rock, of punk infused performance, the road and the players' relationship to violence, hate and peace. Set simultaneously during the post-punk period and the narrative present of 2019, Dance Prone was born out of a love of the underground and indie rock scenes of the 1980s, a fascination for their role in the cultural apparatus of memory, social decay and its reconstruction. ' Lyrical. Violent. Elegiac. Epic. I adore David Coventry' s writing and Dance Prone is a magnificent novel. ' Alan McMonagle author of Laura Cassidy' s Walk of Fame and Ithaca.
' his book is many things. A giddy rush of indie excess, punk mayhem, outsider art, blurred memory, lapsed existence and sudden grace. A mind-bending trip that plays out in that liminal space between innocence and insanity; drift and purpose; rational and rogue; anarchy and calm; between what was lost and what may endure. Cut with a cast of characters sawn through the bone, language that giddies-up the heart, and always, always, alive with a throbbing pulse that insists you read on. Lyrical. Violent. Elegiac. Epic. I adore David Coventry' s writing and Dance Prone is a magnificent novel. -- Alan McMonagle, author of Laura Cassidy' s Walk of Fame and Ithaca. Taught and intelligent, this story of music, trauma and artistic ambition has all the precision, spookiness and elegance of the best post-rock. -- Matt Thorne Praise for David Coventry' s previous book, The Invisible Mile: Bruising, beautiful and ultimately transcendent, there' s a perfect thought on sport, humanity or endurance on just about every page. -- Markus Zusak, author of The Book Thief Absorbing, and on many levels. It' s a book about violence, youth, mythology, history, guilt and love - all set to the agonising rhythm of an inhuman bike race. Some achievement! Fictionalised accounts of sporting events don' t always work, but this has the same feeling of total immersion as I remember feeling when I read David Peace' s The Damned Utd. -- Ned Boulting, cycling broadcaster and author Pick of the Week. David Coventry' s poetic odyssey in the Tour de France. Relates . . . with symbolic force and poetic finesse. * Sydney Morning Herald * Gorgeous . . . Coventry' s brooding narrative, in varying parts philosophical action adventure, travelogue, family drama, war chronicle and psychological puzzler, is suffused with the ever-querying perspective of its haunted central character. * New York Times * A wonderfully colourful and attentive novel that subtly combines the tangible pains of the race with the echoes of war. It isn' t myth-making or playing true events like puppets. Coventry commendably creates his own legend and pays homage to our ancestral competitors in doing so . . . Bursts of brilliance. * Sunday Express * It' s such an accomplished and beautifully refined novel. It almost makes other writers look like they' re just mucking around. -- Kiran Dass * New Zealand Herald * The Invisible Mile is a dream to read, in all senses of the word. It' s a trance-like account of the 1928 Tour de France . . . The writing is fierce, a bravura mix of narcissism, masochism and lyricism grounded in the honesty of the unnamed rider' s journey into his self and the dawning realisation that the race has become a grand metaphor for the trauma of World War I. -- John Sinclair * Metro *
David Coventry was born in 1969 in New Zealand, where he lives with his wife, the novelist Laura Southgate. Published in over fifteen counties, Coventry' s debut, The Invisible Mile, was hailed in the New York Times as a ' gorgeous . . . philosophical action-adventure' , was book of the week in the Sydney Morning Herald. It was described in his home country as ' one of the most gruelling novels about sport ever written' , one which ' immediately places David Coventry among the elite of New Zealand authors. ' He received his MA in 2010 from the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University of Wellington where he is currently completing a PhD.
Status: No local stock, title imported to order
ISBN-13: 9781509839421
Published: 23 Jul 2020
Published In: United Kingdom
Imprint: Picador
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Format: Hardback
Height: 216mm
Width: 135mm
Pages: 400

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