Disaster Was My God by Bruce Duffy

Disaster Was My God by Bruce Duffy

Arthur Rimbaud burst onto the literary scene in 1871 with a startling new voice, transforming himself from an anonymous country boy into the sensation of Paris. His explosive life included a passionate affair with the older (and married) poet Paul Verlaine, and a prosperous career as a trader and arms dealer in Ethiopia. A cancerous leg forced him to return to France, where he died at the age of thirty-seven.

Bruce Duffy takes these astonishing facts and brings them to vivid life in a story rich with humor, exquisite writing, and alarming parallels to our own contemporary moment. Disaster Was My God vividly conveys, as few works ever have, the inner turmoil of this calculating genius, and helps us understand why Rimbaud's work and life continue to influence protean rock legends, from Bob Dylan to Patti Smith.

Bruce Duffy is the author of the autobiographical novel Last Comes the Egg (1997), and--to appear June 2011--Disaster Was My God, a novel based on the life and work of the poet Arthur Rimbaud. An only child raised in a Catholic middle-class family in suburban Maryland, Duffy sees the 1962 death of his mother--essentially by medical malpractice-- as what pushed him to be a writer. Duffy graduated from the University of Maryland in 1973, and has hitchhiked twice across the United States, worked construction, washed dishes, hopped freight trains with hoboes, and reported stories that have taken him to Haiti, Bosnia, and Taliban Afghanistan. Today he lives just outside Washington, D.C., works as a speechwriter, is married to a psychotherapist, and has two grown daughters and a stepson. Writing in Salon, Joyce Carol Oates named The World As I Found It as one of five great nonfiction novels, calling it one of the most ambitious first novels ever published. A former Guggenheim
fellow, Duffy has won the Whiting Writers' Award and a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Award.

David Leavitt 's books include The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer and the novel The Indian Clerk, a finalist for both the PEN/Faulkner Prize and the IMPAC /Dublin Literary Award. He co-directs the MFA program in Creative Writing at the University of Florida.Bruce Duffy was born in Washington, D.C., the son of Irish American parents. His novels include The World as I Found It and Last Comes the Egg. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Award. He lives in Maryland.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780307742865
ISBN 10	0307742865
Title	Disaster Was My God
Author	Bruce Duffy
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Random House USA Inc
Year published	2012-08-07
Number of pages	384
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.