About this item

Often comic, sometimes tender, profoundly truthful, the pleasure in these nonfiction pieces by award-winning novelist Joseph Skibell is discovering along with the author that catastrophes, fantasies, and delusions are what give sweetness and shape to our lives. "As a writer," Skibell has said, "I feel about life the way the people of the Plains felt about the buffalo: I want to use every part of it." In My Father's Guitar and Other Imaginary Things, his first nonfiction work, he mines the events of his own life to create a captivating collection of personal essays, a suite of intimate stories that blurs the line between funny and poignant, and between the imaginary and the real. Often improbable, these stories are 100 percent true. Skibell misremembers the guitar his father promised him; together, he and a telemarketer dream of a better world; a major work of Holocaust art turns out to have been painted by his cousin. Woven together, the stories paint a complex portrait of a man and his family: a businessman father and an artistic son and the difficult love between them; complicated uncles, cousins, and sisters; a haunted house; and - of course - an imaginary guitar. Skibell's novels have been praised as "startlingly original" (the Washington Post) , "magical" (the New Yorker) , and the work of "a gifted, committed imagination" (the New York Times) . With his distinctive style, he has been referred to as "the bastard love child of Mark Twain, I. B. Singer, and Wes Anderson, left on a doorstep in Lubbock, Texas."



About the Author

Joseph Skibell

Possessing "a gifted, committed imagination" (New York Times) , Joseph Skibell is the author of three novels, A Blessing on the Moon, The English Disease, A Curable Romantic, a collection of stories, My Father's Guitar & Other Imaginary Things (forthcoming) , and a mythopoetic study entitled Six Memos From the Last Millennium: A Novelist Reads the Talmud (also forthcoming) . He has received numerous awards, including the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Sami Rohr Award in Jewish Literature, and Story Magazine's Short Short-Story Prize. His work has been described as "daring in its ... honesty" (New York Times) ; "witty and profound" (Jerusalem Report) ; "laugh-outloud humorous" (Forward) ; "brave ... unafraid" (New York Journal of Books) ; "magical" (New Yorker) ; "high-energy, wild" (New Republic) ; and "wholly original" (JM Coetzee) . Skibell's novels, stories and essays have been widely anthologized and translated, most recently into Ido and Chinese. He has written or translated essays for three books of photographs: Loli Kantor's Beyond the Forest, Neil Folberg's The Serpent's Chronicle, and Fred Stein: Paris New York. As the director of the Richard Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature from 2008 to 2015, he sang and played guitar onstage with both Margaret Atwood and Paul Simon, though not at the same time. The Winship Distinguished Research Professor in the Humanities at Emory University, Skibell has taught at the University of Wisconsin, Bar-Ilan University, and the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas. In 2014-2015, he was a Senior Fellow at the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry. (Photos by Laura Noel and Jeffrey Allen)



Read Next Recommendation

Report incorrect product information.