Porgy & Bess by Miles Davis by George Gershwin by Dubose Heyward - by Jeffrey Deshell (Paperback)

About the Book

Porgy and Bess is both artfully daring and morally engaging, a wonderful instance of "passionate virtuosity."

Book Synopsis

Porgy and Bess is both artfully daring and morally engaging, a wonderful instance of "passionate virtuosity." Here, the detective novel's obsession with the grounded rationality of evidence floats away through voices that hang gloomily together, a whole of irresolvable parts. Porgy and Bess is both the death of the detective novel and its beautiful rebirth.

Review Quotes

Porgy and Bess is both artfully daring and morally engaging, a wonderful instance of "passionate virtuosity." Here, the detective novel's obsession with the grounded rationality of evidence floats away through voices that hang gloomily together, a whole of irresolvable parts. Porgy and Bess is both the death of the detective novel and its beautiful rebirth.

Curtis White

About Jeffrey DeShell

Masses and Motets

Jeffrey DeShell has managed to make the form of the crime novel erudite, challenging, and entertaining at the same time. What a wonderful trompe l'oeil, a true literary experiment and adventure. This is a truly fine piece of work.

Percival Everett

The Trouble with Being Born

In The Trouble with Being Born, the parents trade riffs, mother and father telling their stories in short, staccato sentences. Jeffrey DeShell's writing of them gets under the skin, the way parents' "autobiographies" also live under their children's lives. DeShell is a daring, intelligent, hard-eyed, and tenderhearted writer, all of which is abundantly evident in his wonderful new novel.

Lynne Tillman

Arthouse

An avant-noir tour de force, Jeffrey DeShell's Arthouse is an architecturally stunning exploration of how we are all thought by cinema. Peopled by tweakers, dealers, killers, a woman hostage, and an ex-con academic, set in a blasted corner of the New West, and shot through the lenses of fourteen films, this extraordinary novel appropriates and celebrates a multiplicity of filmic vocabularies and points of view, even as it turns family into a Fellini, sex into a Suzuki, and the world into a series of eccentric angles, incommensurate scripts, and beautiful, stylized, joco-serious, self-reflexive textual double exposures.

Lance Olsen