E.L. Doctorow's 'Andrew's Brain' Hits Bookstore Shelves
The Hamptons’ E.L. Doctorow, who has taught writing in Southampton and been called “one of our greatest living writers” by People, released a new novel this week, Andrew’s Brain, which raises questions about truth and memory, brain and mind, and personality and fate.
The book is a radical trip into the mind of a man who, more than once in his life, has been the inadvertent agent of disaster.
Andrew tells the story of his life, his loves, and the tragedies that have led him to this place and point in time.
The New York Times Book Review wrote “Andrew’s Brain is cunning. . . . [A] sly book . . . This babbling Andrew is a casualty of his times, binding his wounds with thick wrappings of words, ideas, bits of story, whatever his spinning mind can unspool for him. . . . One of the things that makes [Andrew] such a terrific comic creation is that he’s both maddeningly self-delusive and scarily self-aware: He’s a fool, but he’s no innocent. . . . Andrew may not be able to enjoy his brain, but Doctorow, freely choosing to inhabit this character’s whirligig consciousness, can.”
Doctorow has been the recipient of the National Book Award, three National Book Critics Circle awards, two PEN/Faulkner awards, the Edith Wharton Citation for Fiction and the presidentially conferred National Humanities Medal.
Andrew’s Brain follows Doctorow’s Ragtime, The Book of Daniel, Billy Bathgate and The March.