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The Drop Edge of Yonder
A new novel by Rudolph Wurlitzer
April 2008
Zebulon Lives - official site for the book.
Rudolph Wurlitzer has published four novels - Nog, Flats, Quake, Slow Fade -
and a non-fiction book, Hard Travel to Sacred Places, as well as three screenplays -
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Two Lane Blacktop, Walker. Among his twelve produced
screenplays are Voyager, Little Buddha, and Candy Mountain, which he co-directed.
He also wrote the libretto for the Philip Glass opera, In the Penal Colony, as well as
several plays and numerous short stories and articles.
Reviews of The Drop Edge of Yonder:
"A picaresque American Book of the Dead... in the tradition of Thomas Pynchon,
Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut and Terry Southern."
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David Ulin, Los Angeles Times Book Review
"[A] funny, inquisitive novel [that] asks readers to re-examine their ideas of the
Western frontier and personal freedom."
-Jeffrey Trachtenberg, The Wall Street Journal
"Wurlitzer delivers a mystic western possessed of anarchic charms and incantatory beauty. This
furiously told legend weaves history and myth into a riotous tale." -
Publishers Weekly
[Starred]-
"Rudy Wurlitzer's first novel in over twenty years may be the most hallucinogenic western
you'll ever catch in the movie house of your mind's eye. What results is a genre farce with
oracular power - a Queen of Hearts sutra, a court jester's Blood Meridian. Wurlitzer
trots through this magic theater like a restless auteur. With Drop Edge, Wurlitzer
has considerably raised the stakes. Over and above its loving and wicked send-up of frontier
lore, Drop Edge invites us to reframe its fictions, like all fictions, perhaps, as
our own Technicolor flashbacks from the dusty arroyo at the end of the line."
-Erik Davis,
Bookforum
"There's a bawdy, lunatic thrill to the tale that seems somehow radical. It's the kind
of book someone will stick in a back pocket before heading out on the trail into the unknown."
-Nathan Ihara,
LA Weekly
"Drop Edge occupies a space between the whimsical and the mystical,
the silly and the sublime. Wurlitzer’s philosophical, humorous, and
visionary yarn guides the reader into a landscape in which to wander
around and get lost, a West that leads into the numinous terra incognita
between sleep and waking, life and death, and toward the contemplation of what it
means to cross a frontier.
Anthony Miller, LA CityBeat
"In his hero, Zebulon Shook, Wurlitzer has invented a funny, acerbic, hugely
compelling representative of American heroism. This is that rare story that
improves as it expands, not unlike another rambling picaresque, Don Quixote."
Mark Athitakis, Washington City Paper
"Wurlitzer's most satisfying read to date... should be as well known as anything by
Cormac McCarthy, Steve Erickson, or Jim Harrison. A pure blast of vituoso storytelling.
[Drop Edge] is a book that shows us our own reflection at this exact moment in
our history --America as a flailing, undomesticated, wild-eyed, hairy brawler, with a big,
confused heart in rebellion against the coarse exigencies of existence and civilization."
-Paul DiFilippo,
Barnes & Noble Review
"An epic Western and a summation of all that's great about Wurlitzer's novels and film
scripts... an old hand laying down what may well be the best piece of writing he's ever
done." -Arthur Magazine
"Mesmerizing. A Western as Celine might have written one." -Michael Greenberg,
Times Literary Supplement of London-
"The Drop Edge of Yonder, Wurlitzer's first novel in 24 years, is his best to date.
It's the rare book that possesses not just big ideas, but the daring cleverness to pull
them off." 5 / 6 Stars -
Michael Miller, Time Out New York
"An epic Western that merges the unique narrative invention of [Wurlitzer's] early novels
with the cinematic drift of his best scripts." -Dazed & Confused
"[A] psychedelic adventure... Ruminative and rip-roaring at once."
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Entertainment Weekly
"[Wurlitzer's] vivid language has a poetic, almost magical, intensity. An atmospheric work
that fuses the road novel and the western. [A] western [that] beautifully captures the
glimmering maya of a gold-and-gun-and-sex-crazed frontier." -Brooklyn Rail
"Wurlitzer opens up his cold-blooded prose veins with the blade of the western genre,
and something sinister and mystically unsettling gushes out." -Baltimore City Paper-
Advance praise for The Drop Edge of Yonder:
"If Mel Brooks, William Burroughs and Jack Smith collaborated on a scenario for Ramona, then
had a falling out and were replaced by Guy Maddin, the result might bear some resemblance to
Rudolph Wurlitzer's tender, hair-raising, obscene and gloriously funny new novel, The
Drop Edge of Yonder. Wurlitzer is back in top form and is, as always, a somber joy to
read." -John Ashbery
"The Drop Edge of Yonder is a place where people can't afford their own feelings and
survival counts for everything even if it isn't worth what it costs. It's Schoenberg playing
on a whorehouse piano, a roulette wheel spinning on a melting ice floe, Sam Beckett with a six gun
and a sack of rattlesnakes. Rudolph Wurlitzer wrings your heart like a chicken's neck while he
shows you the cannibal in your bathroom mirror: our true American myth of origin." -
Gary Indiana
"A wild adventure written by a bard who knows how to keep his audience spellbound by the campfire.
And it's a subversive modern novel about the bounds of love and the discontents of civilized
life. And it's also an invitation, delivered with an archaic smile, to meditate with a master
on letting go." -Judith Thurman
"The Drop Edge of Yonder is a book you watch as you read, cast the film as you reread,
and create a sequel as you sleep. A hypnotic yarn of poetry and mystical love." -Patti Smith
"I have never read anything like it. Every page transports the reader from the cerebral to the
visceral and back again, until you start to feel that in the end there is no difference
between the two." -Scott Spencer
"One of the most purely, deeply thrilling, inspired, and inspiring American novels I've read
in many years." -Dennis Cooper
"The Drop Edge of Yonder is a book Fellini would have stolen and turned into a major film.
He would have used all of Wurlitzer's flamboyant, surreal characters as well as his rich,
endlessly imaginative language and storytelling abilities, and he’d swear it was all his.
But it’s not. It’s Wurlitzer’s, and he has a sly, subversive humor that is inimitable. I enjoyed
this book immensely." -Alan Arkin
"A wild ride into the heart of the California gold rush. Wurlitzer’s women make
‘Deadwood’ look like ‘Bonanza’.” -Robert Downey, Sr.
Synopsis:
In his fifth novel, Rudolph Wurlitzer has written a classic tale of the western frontier
and created one of his most memorable characters in Zebulon, a mountain man whose view of
life has been challenged by a curse from a mysterious Native American woman whose love he
inadvertently murdered.
The Drop Edge of Yonder begins in the mountains of Colorado and ends in the far
reaches of the Northwest, a journey that includes the beginnings of a Mexican revolution,
a voyage across the Gulf of Mexico to Panama, and up the coast of California to San Francisco
and the gold fields. Along the trail, Zebulon becomes involved in a series of tragic love
triangles, witnesses the death of his mother and father, and confronts the age-old questions
of life, love, and death.
News:
*Read the Entertainment Weekly interview with "cult author" Rudy Wurlitzer,
discussing how the book evolved from a script entitled Zebulon that had interest
from Sam Peckinpah, Hal Ashby, Richard Gere, and Alex Cox, into "an acclaimed novel."
Entertainment
Weekly Interview.
*Rudy will be appearing with best-selling author Scott Spencer at 192 Books in New York
on Thursday, April 3. NOTE: This will more than likely be the absolutely only reading that Rudy
does of The Drop Edge of Yonder. You must reserve seating in advance at 192, so if you're
interested in attending, we recommend that you do so as soon as possible.
192 Books website.
*Read the complete article from The Times Literary Supplement of London that
discusses The Drop Edge of Yonder.
Click for complete article.
*In Time Out New York's "The Best (and Worst) of 2007" article, The Drop Edge of
Yonder is mentioned as an "early sign of promise" that publishers will present more challenging
titles in 2008.
Click for complete article.
*The Drop Edge of Yonder is listed by Time Out New York as one of three books to
"watch out for" in Spring 2008.
Click for complete article.
*The opening two chapters of The Drop Edge of Yonder are excerpted in Issue #2 of
MURDALAND: Crime fiction for the 21st Century, available now in bookstores.
Review copies:
If you are affiliated with a media review outlet and would like to receive an advance galley
copy of The Drop Edge of Yonder, contact Brian Obenauf at brian [at] twodollarradio.com.
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