Description
A madcap tale of sadistic power-play by one of the 20th century's most beloved French gay writers.
My Manservant and Me is a story about the trials and tribulations of having a live-in valet. Written from the uneasy perspective of an aging, incontinent author of extremely successful middlebrow plays, we learn about his manservant, a young film actor who is easily moved to both delicate gestures and terrible tantrums; who's been authorized to handle his master's finances, who orders stock buys, dictates his master's wardrobe, sleeps in his master's bed, and yet won't let him watch variety television. My Manservant and Me reveals the rude specificities of this relationship with provocative humor and stylistic abjection. This manservant won't be going anywhere.
About the Author
Andrew Durbin is a writer and editor who lives in New York. He is the author of Mature Themes (2014) and MacArthur Park (2017), both from Nightboat Books. In 2018, MacArthur Park was a finalist for the Believer Book Award. He is the editor of Kevin Killian's Fascination: Memoirs (Semiotexte, 2018) and the chapbook series Say bye to reason and hi to everything (Capricious, 2015). His fiction, criticism, and poetry have appeared in BOMB, Boston Review, frieze, Mousse, The Paris Review, Triple Canopy, and elsewhere. He is the US Senior Editor of frieze magazine.
Reviews
"If a reader wants to know what truly innovative contemporary American fiction looks like, Andrew Durbin's MacArthur Park offers an excellent example. Melding the essayistic and the dramatic with an ironic sheen and narrative depth that impress at every turn, Durbin shows what lies behind the public selves presented by social media, skillfully taking the social and cultural temperature of our time."--John Keene "Andrew Durbin's MacArthur Park flows and revels in the contemporary current. It's wry, dramatic, cool, knowing, funny, sobering, a novel of unsparing consciousness that spars with the news and effects of uncontrollable weather."--Lynne Tillman "Andrew Durbin gives us all the information we will need to make it in the precarious margins of the art world: parables of love and drugs, evidence of the impending apocalypse, and play-by-plays of the cocktail and conference banter of the powerful."--Lucy Ives "One of the few younger writers brazen enough to take up Gary Indiana's velvet-lined gauntlet, Andrew Durbin steals from the master's toolbox only to construct something entirely his own, personal or, rather, 'personal.'"--Bruce Hainley
"Haunting and beautiful and full of phantoms past and present, Skyland rewrites the mythic."--Chloe Aridjis
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