Description
A novel for our times, from the Booker-shortlisted 'master craftsman who is steering the contemporary novel towards exciting new territories' (Observer). Meet U. -- a talented and uneasy figure currently pimping his skills to an elite consultancy in contemporary London. His employers advise everyone from big businesses to governments, and, to this end, expect their 'corporate anthropologist' to help decode and manipulate the world around them -- all the more so now that a giant, epoch-defining project is in the offing. Instead, U. spends his days procrastinating, meandering through endless buffer-zones of information and becoming obsessed by the images with which the world bombards him on a daily basis: oil spills, African traffic jams, roller-blade processions, zombie parades. Is there, U. wonders, a secret logic holding all these images together -- a codex that, once cracked, will unlock the master-meaning of our age? Might it have something to do with South Pacific Cargo Cults, or the dead parachutists in the news? Perhaps; perhaps not. As U. oscillates between the visionary and the vague, brilliance and bullshit, Satin Island emerges, an impassioned and exquisite novel for our disjointed times.
About the Author
Tom McCarthy — “English fiction’s new laureate of disappointment” (Time Out, September 2007) — is a writer and artist. He was born in 1969 and lives in a tower-block in London. Tom grew up in Greenwich, south London, and studied English at New College, Oxford. After a couple of years in Prague in the early 1990s, he lived in Amsterdam as literary editor of the localTime Out, and later worked in British television as well as co-editingMutemagazine.His debut novelRemainderwas first published in November 2005 by Paris-based art press Metronome. After becoming a cult hit championed first by British webzines (it was3:AM Magazine’sBook of the Year for 2005) and then by the literary press,Remainderwas republished by Alma Books in the UK (2006) and Vintage in the US (2007). A French version is to be followed by editions in Japanese, Korean, Greek, Spanish and Croatian.A work of literary criticism,Tintin and the Secret of Literature, was released by Granta Books in June 2006. It also came out in France and an American edition is in the offing.Tom’s second novel,Men in Spacecame out in 2007.He has published numerous stories, essays and articles on literature, philosophy and art in publications includingThe Observer,The Times Literary SupplementandContemporary Magazine, as well as in anthologies such asLondon from Punk to Blair(Reaktion Books),Theology and the Political(Duke University Press) andThe Milgram Experiment(Jan van Eyck Press). His story, “Kool Thing, Or Why I Want to Fuck Patty Hearst” appeared inThe Empty Page: Fiction Inspired By Sonic Youth(Serpent’s Tail) in 2008.His ongoing project the International Necronautical Society, a semi-fictitious avant-garde network that surfaces through publications, proclamations, denunciations and live events, has been described byUntitled Magazineas ‘the most comprehensive total art work we have seen in years’ and byArt Monthlyas ‘a platform for fantastically mobile thinking’. In 2003 the INS broke into the BBC website and inserted propaganda into its source-code. The following year, they set up a broadcasting unit at the ICA from which more than forty ‘agents’ generated non-stop poem-codes which were transmitted over FM radio in London and by internet to collaborating radio stations around the world.Tom has also tutored and lectured at various institutions including the Architectural Association, Central Saint Martins School of Art, the Royal College of Art, Goldsmiths College and Southern California Institute of Architecture. He recently taught a course on ‘Catastrophe’ with Marko Daniel at the London Consortium.
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