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| Photo credit: Greg
Martin |
Christopher
Sorrentino
Trance
Farrar,
Straus and Giroux
Based on the 1974 kidnapping
of Patty Hearst, a vivid re-imagining of the
consciousness of the perpetrators, the victims,
and the law enforcement agents who pursued the
case.
Trance
is Christopher Sorrentino’s
second novel. His first novel was Sound
on Sound. He has contributed fiction, essays,
and criticism to a variety of publications,
including The Baffler, Bookforum and
Conjunctions. He is a contributor to
Give Our Regards to the Atomsmashers: Writers
on Comics. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Judges' Citation
Trance is a fever
dream in which magical thinking masquerades as privileged
knowledge, hateful indifference as motherly love,
and a presidency effortlessly collapsed into the blackest
of comedy routines. Within Sorrentino's crazed Looking
Glass, a sentimental Alice loses her head to exquisitely
dysfunctional visionaries. Blinded and entranced,
she—like the oblivious proletariat who are targeted
for liberation—is the first to suffer collateral
damage. The humor, irrepressible, is devastating,
the voices pitch-perfect, the novel's moral focus
admirably sustained. A luminous cautionary tale.
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