Fiction. PETER: AN (A)HISTORICAL ROMANCE, a controversial new novel by one of our most important, innovative, and uncompromising authors re-envisions Herman Melville's Pierre in 1999 Los Angeles. An orphaned child of privilege, Peter enjoys a snug existence full of things--to eat, to wear, and to play with. But his world is rocked when he meets a young Palestinian woman, Reham, who claims to be Peter's half-sister. DeShell's excessive, digressive opera of objects follows these two to Istanbul, Jerusalem, and Gaza City, teetering on the razor's edge between obsession and rejection, fascination and disgust. "A trenchant indictment of everything rampant materialism sought to co-opt in the late 1990s--love, individuality, history, cultural identity"--TimeOut Chicago. "By turns hilariousand harrowing, Peter is pure dynamite"--Laird Hunt.

PETER: AN (A)HISTORICAL ROMANCE

Literature & Fiction

DeShell, Jeffrey

United States

Starcherone Books

A crime novel loosely based on the masses and songs of the 17th century Flemish composer Pierre de la Rue Masses and Motets is a tale composed of four basic interwoven threads, corresponding to the four-part choral writing of Pierre de la Rue’s service music. The first thread comes from the diaries of a recently murdered priest, Father Andrea Vidal, former secretary to the notorious Father Marcial Maciel. The second thread is the mystery story, a police procedural focusing on the efforts of Denver detective Francesca Fruscella to solve the murder and retrieve Vidal’s diary. The third strand is the story of Father Signelli, a priest sent from the Vatican to “fix” the murder. And the fourth strand explores the best and worst of Catholic culture: art and music created by Catholic artists and sexual abuse by Catholic priests. Vidal’s narrative is the story of a priest who systematically, sincerely, and hopefully tries to destroy his very self through sex, drinking, and drugs in order to get closer to God. Fruscella’s story is that of a middle-aged, female detective trying to solve a ghastly murder while constantly battling the sexism of the Catholic Church. Signelli’s tale is that of an older career priest who, in doing the bidding of his superiors to fix problems that threaten the order of the Church, has perhaps compromised his own soul. By no means a simple narrative of wicked priests, this is a story of men who desperately want to believe, as well as a story of what this belief might shelter and cost.

Masses and Motets: A Francesca Fruscella Mystery

Literary

Fiction Collective 2

Novel, memoir, and anti-memoir, The Trouble with Being Born depicts the lives of Frances and Joe, husband and wife. Told in their own alternating voices, they recall their lives, separately and together, and the divergent trajectories of their origins and aspirations. Frances's story moves in reverse: beginning with her dementia in old age, her narrative moves backwards into lucidity, through a cruel and loveless marriage, the birth of her son Jeffrey, and into a childhood that she recalls fondly as a time of innocence and belonging. Joe's memories begin in childhood, a bewildered boy struggling with poverty, racism, and isolation, and we watch him grow into a manhood fraught with wrong turns, rage, betrayals, and disappointment, caring in the end for the woman he has long mistreated. The Trouble with Being Born is a stark meditation on memory and the struggle–both necessary and impossible–to remember.

The Trouble with Being Born: A Novel

Normal0falsefalsefalseMicrosoftInternetExplorer4Arthouse is an audacious transformation in prose of fourteen modernist films. From film to film, Jeffrey DeShell follows a forty-something failed film studies academic—The Professor. While The Professor is reinvented with each new chapter (or film), what remains is DeShell’s inventive deconstruction and representation of modern cinema. At times borrowing imagery, plot, or character elements, and at times rendering lighting, rhythm, costuming, or shot sequences into fictional language, The Professor’s journey sends him from the Southwestern town of Pueblo, Colorado, into the role of rescuer as he aids an attempted-rape victim, and finally to Italy. Ultimately though, The Professor is left alone, struggling to reconcile the real world with his life in cinema.

Arthouse: A Novel

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Mystery

On the surface a murder mystery—a detective’s search for the killer of five people in Denver—Expectation is also, among other things, a meditation on the relationship between language and music. In his newest novel, Jeffrey DeShell draws on the musical innovations of Arnold Schoenberg—by turns traditional, serial, and atonal—to inform his grammar and language. Moving progressively through specific Schoenberg compositions, DeShell complicates the surface of his text into lyrical derivatives, all the while drawing us into a murder mystery like no other as Detective Francisca Fruscella pursues both the killer and her own complicated personal history. By turns rapturous, rigorous, and gripping, Expectation is a thriller of another kind—and a bold venture to the limits of the mystery genre and language itself.

Expectation: A Francesca Fruscella Mystery

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.

Porgy & Bess

Genre Fiction

Spuyten Duyvil Publishing

Pretty

Humor & Satire

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Books by DeShell, Jeffrey