TIME FOR A VACATION.
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McSweeney's is proud to announce the arrival of our fall novel, Vacation by Deb Olin Unferth. The Village Voice says, "Vacation, Deb Olin Unferth's dreamy, surreal debut novel, reads like an extended hallucination or out-of-body experience, as unsettling as it is compelling."
We invite you to come see her and, at one event, special guest Paul Collins, and, at another, special guest Roddy Doyle. The tour begins in late September in the Midwest, then moves on to the West Coast. Eli Horowitz, a McSweeney's editor, is scheduled to read from his personal diary at each event. After the Portland reading, a special musical guest, Two Beers, will perform. For tour details, go here.
Sam Lipsyte says, "Deb Olin Unferth is one of the most daring and entertaining writers in America today. She is an artist who knows that every sentence is an opportunity to have it all—music, invention, narrative drive—and hers most definitely do. This novel is tricky, odd, unnerving, hilarious, and, ultimately, quite scary, not to mention very, very moving. We may or may not deserve this Vacation, but we are lucky to have it."
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AN EXCERPT
FROM VACATION.
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I recall only one sentence that she said. She said it all the time. Every
day was an occasion. if she had to be away on a shoot, she said it to my
father. if i had to take cough syrup, she said it to me. She said it to the
family dog before his operation. it was her wisdom. She said it with
pride. What my mother said was: You won't even feel it.
i was born in the city. My father was a bank man, my mother starred
in soaps. We lived like the famous in a house by the park and i woke to a
vase of fresh tulips each day. We had long hallways and long tablecloths.
My mother had rooms full of clothes. So many strangers gave us presents
that we had a man to pen our thank-yous. Photographers slept outside
the house. one day when i was five, my mother was hit by a car and she felt it
and she died and we felt it. We went away for a while, paid off our debts
from afar, tried to live without her. We came back to the city. My father's
business spoiled dollar by dollar. We lived on her money. Each year we grew poorer. We sold the house and moved into a smaller house and then
into a large rented apartment, then into a smaller one. We moved around
the city, fitting into smaller and smaller spaces, each time carrying our
valuables up and down stairways—the chests, the paintings, the family
china, the sofas, the wardrobes. We finally landed in the smallest studio
with the dog and our little cat and all of our furniture and light fixtures
and jewelry. We laid out the expensive rugs one on top of another on the
floor. We hung the paintings floor to low ceiling. it was in this room
that my father became sick and couldn't work. We sold our things off
one by one, peeled up a rug or took down a picture, and in this way we
paid the medical bills and the other bills and we lived, somewhat. When
the floor and walls were bare and the room was mostly cleared out, my
father had one more thing to tell me. Early in our marriage, he said, your
mother ran off with someone else and she came back pregnant. You are
not my daughter.
I felt that too.
I was sixteen that year.
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Buy your copy here.
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OTHER McSWEENEY'S FEATURES:
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Time for a Vacation
Ulysses Sells Out By Rebekah Frumkin
There's a Plumbing Problem in the Hamptons By John Frank Weaver
Fragments From Palin! The Musical By Ben Greenman
An Anti-Environmentalist Drafts His Next Newspaper Column While Eating Takeout and Driving His Hummer By Benjamin Cohen
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