American Purgatorio - Softcover

John Haskell is the author of a short-story collection, I Am Not Jackson Pollock (FSG, 2003). His work has appeared in Granta, The Paris Review, Conjunctions and Ploughshares. He is a contributor to the radio show The Next Big Thing. He lives in Brooklyn.

"I liked John Haskell’s American Purgatorio--that is to say, I liked its tone--from the first page; by page twenty I was completely in love with it and shortly after that I began to think that it might turn out to be a great book. At the same time, since it was so weird, such a high-wire act, I worried, briefly, that Haskell might blow it in some way. Such worries proved short-lived: American Purgatorio gets better and better. It is wildly original, wonderful, amazing, tender, heart-breaking. It’s also--and this is remarkable in a book that is so funny--extremely wise. I was going to say your life will be improved by reading it but I think that gets things the wrong way round; your life will be impoverished if you don’t." --Geoff Dyer, author of Out of Sheer Rage

Praise for I Am Not Jackson Pollock:

"In these wholly unique meditations on what it is to be human...Haskell makes the familiar his own--playing with language and history, turning time inside out, he delivers our culture back to us--made entirely new." --A.M. Holmes

"John Haskell's I am Not Jackson Pollock is a wonderfully intelligent, audacious and perverse collection of . . . what exactly? Fiction? Gossip? Film studies? Iconograph? Liberty taking? Here's a book that defies the usual categories -- but one thing's for sure, I savored every mythic, mesmerizing word of it." --Jim Crace

"Stunningly sophisticated stories in which everything is new." --Susan Reynolds, Los Angeles Times

"Dazzlingly inventive." --Elle

"The highly original, Hemingway-esque prose is just as colorful and provocative as Pollock's paintings." --Karyn L. Barr, Entertainment Weekly