Joe Gould's Secret
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Vintage Publishing
Published:3rd Oct '19
Should be back in stock very soon
A compelling portrait of a true New York eccentric and the agony of writer's block. After the publication of this book Joseph Mitchell never published another word during three decades working as a reporter for the New Yorker
‘It's a masterpiece, of course, but more than that it shows that there is some such thing as being a simple observer’ Nicci French, Independent
It was 1932 when Joseph Mitchell first came across Joe Gould, a Harvard-educated vagrant of Greenwich Village.
‘It's a masterpiece, of course, but more than that it shows that there is some such thing as being a simple observer’ Nicci French, Independent
It was 1932 when Joseph Mitchell first came across Joe Gould, a Harvard-educated vagrant of Greenwich Village. Penniless, filthy, scurrilous, charming, thieving, Joe Gould was widely considered a genius. He was working on a book he called an Oral History – the longest book ever written he claimed, formed of recorded conversations set down in exercise books. Of course, when Gould died the great epic was nowhere to be found.
This compelling portrait of a true New York eccentric, a man who embodied the disconnected, delusional nature of real life, was Mitchell’s personal enquiry into the agony of writer’s block.
Joe Gould's Secret can be found in the longer collection of Mitchell's writing Up in the Old Hotel.
Why does the book mean so much to us? It's a masterpiece, of course, but more than that it shows that there is some such thing as being a simple observer -- Nicci French * Independent *
A little masterpiece of observation and storytelling * Ian McEwan *
ISBN: 9781784875619
Dimensions: 198mm x 129mm x 6mm
Weight: 96g
112 pages