In the words of Isabel Allende, “Here is a poet who writes with economy and precise beauty of desire, love, and the irrevocable loneliness of the heart.” In his first novel since the highly acclaimed Curves of Pursuit, Thomas Farber has created his own language of love, in this rapturous evocation of an obsessive and erotic relationship.He is a writer, middle-aged, thoughtful, long engaged in a project that involves observing and describing the female form. She is young, married, and beautiful, an art historian who wants to write.The writer recounts an increasingly charged series of trysts in which he and the young woman create a heady other-world where there are no husbands and no limits. No longer merely subjects for conversation, the passions shared by the writer and the young woman—for art, storytelling, and experience—fuel a transgressive vision of love that cannot, in the end, compete with the demands of the ordered world, and someone must lose.

The Beholder: A Novel

Literature & Fiction

Farber, Thomas

United States

Picador

Stories describe the author's life as a writer, personal relationships, and understanding of the nature of fiction

Compared to What: On Writing and the Writer's Life

Biographies & Memoirs

W.W. Norton & Co., Inc.

Who wrote the book of love?

Norton

In his first novel, Thomas Farber gives us an unusually honest look inside the heart of a man trying to understand the curves of pursuit in his own life. His ties, for example, to his older brother: as boys and on into adulthood, the two communicate best with a football, sending each other out for passes, cheering each other on with their private polylingual wordplay. The pattern that exists with the parents is another, a curve of pursuit marked always by the imminence and the memory of death. And so too with his marriage, where all that is between  him and his wife is richly verbal, intricate, and in real jeopardy, and  where their cats are the witnesses to the intensity of what binds them.  Despite the narrator's feeling of loss, and despite his remorse, we begin to see with them perhaps certain connections which simply cannot be severed. That whatever else is also true, the bonds of love may persist.

Curves of Pursuit

Women's Fiction

Penguin Adult HC/TR

Tales for the Son of My Unborn Child: Berkeley, 1966-1969

Dutton

A sophisticated, taboo-breaking novel of the sexual obsession of an older man and a young married woman, in the long-awaited return of an acclaimed novelist. "Once upon a time, her aunt calls . . . Can he meet with the niece?" He is a writer, middle-aged, thoughtful, engaged in a project that involves observing and describing the female form. The niece is young, married, and beautiful, an art historian who wants to write. They have much in common, the aunt suggests. The light acquaintance soon turns darkly erotic. The writer recounts an increasingly charged series of trysts in which he and the young woman create a heady otherworld, where there are no husbands and no limits, where uninhibited lovers may discard the deepest taboos. No longer merely subjects for conversation, the passions shared by the writer and the young woman -- for art, storytelling, and experience -- fuel a transgressive vision of love that cannot, in the end, compete with the demands of the ordered world. Written in taut, hypnotic prose, The Beholder plumbs the seductive depths of obsession and the paradoxes of the human heart. In his first novel in fifteen years, Thomas Farber has delivered a rapturous evocation of erotic love.

Contemporary

Metropolitan Books

Elegant, exuberant, and idiosyncratic, Acting My Age is a memoir and meditation by one of America's most playful and inventive writers. In the words of Mary Mackey (The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams), "in Acting My Age, Thomas Farber gives us an unflinching, luminous, cleverly conceived meditation on his own mortality as well as on the extinction of the coral reefs, snow leopards, dolphins, and, ultimately the human species. Couching his observations in a series of short, interconnected, almost-epigrammatic essays that read like prose poems, Farber creates a narrative style reminiscent of Joyce and Melville: oceanic in depth and all-encompassing in range." Gerald Fleming (The Choreographer) calls Acting My Age "a praise song, an exultation in the beauties and brutalities of being human. Though Thomas Farber is wide-eyed at the miracle of our existence, his prose details both the collapse of species and ultimate trajectory of our aging bodies. This polymathic dive into a writer's remaining time--into the life of the earth, the sea, and meaning itself--is no mere memoir, but an elegant, instructive page-after-page of language-love." Robert Roper (Nabokov in America: On the Road to Lolita) adds: "Tom Farber is always good company, and his 'late writings' are more and more indispensable, full of comfort for the perplexed, rich in learning, humorous, masculine and tender, evoking large sensations and vast views; a reader thinks of Montaigne, Whitman, and other of the great truth-tellers, modest of tone, intimate in approach, friends bringing deep gifts."

Acting My Age (Mānoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing, 37)

Science & Math

Nature & Ecology

University of Hawaii Press

A collection of meditative and startlingly insightful essays contemplate the relationship of man and his thoughts and civilization to the nature of water, blending scientific and literary references with descriptions of surfing and sailing.

On Water

History & Criticism

Ecco Pr

"...by turns a diary, a reading journal, and a meditation on the creative process." Collecting Thomas Farber's nonfiction on writing and the writing life (including all of "Compared to What?"), A Lover's Quarrel contains this gifted author's meditation on his vocation.  Anatomist, ironist, and moralist, Farber achieves effects of luminous integrity with deceptively simple means.  A gift to writers who seek to understand what informs or haunts their metier, A Lover's Quarrel is also for any readers whose lives have been shaped-or saved-by story.

A Lover's Quarrel: On Writing and the Writing Life

Reference

Writing, Research & Publishing Guides

Creative Arts Book Co.

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