INTRODUCING
MILLARD KAUFMAN.
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Let's say you're born in 1917. You make extra money in college enduring
experimental cobra-venom injections, spend the early '40s fighting in the
South Pacific, and return home to try your luck in Hollywood. Later, you
create a famous cartoon character, pal around with Montgomery Clift and
Elizabeth Taylor, and earn two Oscar nominations. Today, you'd be 90
years old. Are you done? If you are Millard Kaufman, you are not done.
Instead, if you are Millard Kaufman, you'd write Bowl of Cherries, the kind of novel authors of every age hope to write someday—a novel so
sharp and sure-footed that every sentence sings. The thing is packed with renegade Egyptologists, libidinous ranch hands, excrement speculators, and grenade-toting Israelis, with a wunderkind narrator who shoots from Charlottesville to an Ivy League English department to imprisonment in a chicken-shaped district in southern Iraq. It's funnier and more up-to-the-minute than anything else out there, with a truer take on love and greed than anyone 89 or under would have the guts to get on paper. Bowl of Cherries is the sort of book you'll rush back to whenever you have a spare minute until you've read the last word, and it's available in our store now. (It'll be available elsewhere
in a few weeks.)
Publishers Weekly has already
given Bowl of Cherries a starred review, saying, "Kaufman's
screwball sensibility, relish for language, gleeful vulgarism and deep
sympathy for his characters make this novel an unprecedented joyride.
Whether it's due to his being alive for 90 years or not, Kaufman's book is
shot through with worldly wit and a keen sense of the humor in human
foibles." We'll be posting other reviews here as they come out, along with a
short film about Millard that should be ready next week. We've posted
the first chapter here, as a
PDF, and have packaged a more extensive excerpt with McSweeney's Issue 24.
Meanwhile, the Writers Guild of America has just declared Millard to be a
"Living Legend." If you'll be in Los Angeles on September 15, join them
for a screening of his groundbreaking neo-Western, Bad Day at Black Rock. Millard will be there to take questions afterward. Tickets are on sale now.
In short:
To buy Bowl of Cherries, click here.
To learn more about Bowl of Cherries, click here.
For press inquiries in connection with Bowl of Cherries, e-mail press@mcsweeneys.net.
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OTHER McSWEENEY'S FEATURES:
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Introducing Millard Kaufman
As Your Manager, I Think It's Time to Rethink Some of the Advice I Gave You, Starlet By Aaron Spiewak
Debate for Emperor of the Upsilon Sigma Star System By Teddy Wayne
Brett Ratner's Notes for His Film Version of The Road by Cormac McCarthy By Wendy Molyneux
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