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Novelist Paul La Farge has died on the age of 52. He handed from most cancers on January 18th in Poughkeepsie, New York as confirmed by his spouse.
La Farge was a New York native whose essays and fiction appeared in publications like The Village Voice, The New Yorker, and McSweeney’s. His debut novel, The Artist of the Missing, printed in 1999 and is ready in a modern-day, unnamed metropolis the place individuals regularly go lacking. The ebook’s primary character paints portraits of the lacking, together with the dad and mom and brother who disappeared in his childhood, after which of his romantic curiosity, a police photographer, when she too finally ends up among the many misplaced.
La Farge obtained a number of fellowships and literary honors in his lifetime, together with the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002 and a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in 2012. He was awarded six MacDowell Fellowships and wrote The Night Ocean (2017) throughout his time at MacDowell in 2014. In this intense and psychological work of cosmic horror, a psychiatrist discovers her husband’s obsession with H.P. Lovecraft might have result in his dying by suicide. In an essay for The New Yorker in 2017, La Farge wrote about in regards to the curious friendship between Lovecraft and a younger man named Robert Barlow that impressed what’s extensively considered his biggest work. His different notable works embody Haussman, or the Distinction and Luminous Airplanes.
As quite a few reflections of La Farge’s work level out, his work will not be simply categorized, experimenting with model, timelines, and narrative construction. In an e mail to the New York Times, fellow author, pal, and fan Gary Shteyngart described studying La Farge’s work as being “gently lowered into a bath of perfect temperature, as ideas, revelations, universes float by,” including that “His books are inhabited by some of the most real and conflicted and lost people to have walked through 21st-century prose.”
Shteyngart and different authors, pals, and colleagues have taken to social media to lament La Farge’s passing and comment on the lasting influence of his work.
Find extra information and tales of curiosity from the ebook world in Breaking in Books.
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