Ahab (Sequels)

Product Description The reader will find here the true aftermath of the adventures of Ahab, self-described captain, survivor of his last fight against a giant fish. We will see how this retiree with a wooden leg tried to sell his whale story to the highest bidder - in the form of a Broadway musical, then a Hollywood script. Along the way, we will encounter Cole Porter and his chorus girls, but also Cary Grant, Orson Welles, Joseph von Sternberg and Scott Fitzgerald, drowned in his alcohol, as well as a host of producers, shady to varying degrees. We will remember the passage of young Ahab embarking at seventeen for London in the hope of playing Shakespeare there, and the circumstances which presided over the meeting of the librettist Da Ponte with Herman Melville in 1838. We will learn, ultimately, the best way to make the Manhattan cocktail a success and with what tenacity the indestructible Moby Dick seeks revenge on his nemesis. Review "What makes Ahab (Sequels) the proper inheritor of the avant-garde is not merely its formal uniqueness, but the way that it challenges its reader to forgo the logic of pleasure entirely and, in doing so, to experience, for the duration of reading, something we used to be able to count on the institution of the avant-garde to provide: a space where we might be able to exert some measure of autonomy from the market forces that dominate every other square inch of our culture." - Ryan Ruby, The Nation"Here is a writer who is a wellspring of science, in which a jovial Cartesian devil is ever sinking and rising. His unaffected erudition finds itself threatened, then effectively blown to pieces, by an imagination and a humor that laugh in the face of sanctioned knowledges." - Éric ChevillardRecipient of the Prix Wepler (2015)