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Get Lit: Win a copy of Dan Chaon's Await Your Reply
The Web site for the award-winning alternative weekly, the Philadelphia City Paper.
Get Lit: Win a copy of Dan Chaon's Await Your Reply
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| Ballantine, Aug. 25 |
In today's Shelf Life lit column, Justin Bauer compares four novelists who grapple with notions of identity — Boualem Sansal, Rawi Hage, Michelle Huneven and Dan Chaon — with varying success.
He particularly dug Chaon's Await Your Reply:
Chaon's characters — three sets of them, in three independent, loosely linked storylines — each willingly shuck off the lives they've been given. They get into their cars and set off to create entirely new selves, in the barrenness of the Michigan backwoods or an abandoned Great Plains motel or trekking through the Canadian tundra.
On one hand, Chaon's bleak, thrilling high-wire stories celebrate the freedom of losing yourself, even as this lack of stability opens up his narrative to weirdness and terror. But in showing the ease with which his characters cast off one identity and assume another, Chaon questions the basic existence of a single identity.
Since today feels like the kind of day we'd like to trade our identity out for someone else's (maybe someone who has Phils playoff tickets?), we're giving away a copy to the first Clog reader who can answer the following trivia question:
At which Midwestern college does Chaon teach?
E-mail me at carolyn.huckabay@citypaper.net for a chance to win. (Go Phils!)
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