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    The Complete Ballet: A Fictional Essay in Five Acts
    Unavailable
    The Complete Ballet: A Fictional Essay in Five Acts
    Unavailable
    The Complete Ballet: A Fictional Essay in Five Acts
    Ebook205 pages3 hours

    The Complete Ballet: A Fictional Essay in Five Acts

    By John Haskell

    5/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    A dark-hued, hybrid novel by a writer who “delivers our culture back to us, made entirely new” (A. M. Homes)

    In The Complete Ballet, John Haskell choreographs an intricate and irresistible pas de deux in which fiction and criticism come together to create a new kind of story. Fueled by the dramatic retelling of five romantic ballets, and interwoven with a contemporary story about a man whose daunting gambling debt pushes him to the edge of his own abyss, it is both a pulpy entertainment and a meditation on the physicality—and psychology—of dance.

    The unnamed narrator finds himself inexorably drawn back to the pre–cell phone world of Technicolor Los Angeles, to a time when the tragedies of his life were about to collide. Working as a part-time masseur in Hollywood, he attends an underground poker game with his friend Cosmo, a strip-club entrepreneur. What happens there hurtles the narrator down the road and into the room where the novel’s violent and surreal showdown leaves him a different person.

    As the narrator revisits his past, he simultaneously inhabits and reconstructs the mythic stories of ballet, assessing along the way the lives and obsessions of Nijinsky and Balanchine, Pavlova and Fonteyn, Joseph Cornell and the story’s presiding spirit, the film director John Cassavetes. This compulsively readable fiction is ultimately a profound and haunting consideration of the nature of art and identity.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateSep 19, 2017
    ISBN9781555979799
    Unavailable
    The Complete Ballet: A Fictional Essay in Five Acts
    Author

    John Haskell

    John Haskell is the author of Out of My Skin, American Purgatorio and of the short-story collection I Am Not Jackson Pollock. A contributor to the radio program The Next Big Thing, he lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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    Reviews for The Complete Ballet

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    • 5/5
      Really fun book! Excellent in every way. Plot lines of great ballets run alongside a character making some bad decisions in his life.