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Joe Gould's Secret

Joseph Mitchell author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Vintage Publishing

Published:3rd Oct '19

Should be back in stock very soon

Joe Gould's Secret cover

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