B E-Book

Edward Carey

• Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 84

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Author and illustrator Edward Carey presents a paean to connection at a time of isolation: a year of daily lockdown drawings posted on social media from his home in Texas.In March 2020, as lockdowns were imposed around the world, author and illustrator Edward Carey published a sketch on social media with a plan to keep posting a drawing a day from his family home in Austin, Texas, until life returned to normal. One hundred and fifty pencil stubs later, he was still drawing.Carey's hand moved with world events, chronicling pandemic and politics. It reached into the past, taking inspiration from history, and escaped grim reality through flights of vivid imagination and studies of the natural world. The drawings became a way of charting time, of moving forward, and maintaining connection at a time of isolation.This remarkable collection of words and drawings from the acclaimed author of Little and The Swallowed Man charts a tumultuous year in pencil, finding beauty amid the horror of extraordinary times.

Leseprobe

EDWARD CAREY is a novelist, visual artist and playwright. He is the author and illustrator of four novels – Observatory Mansions, Alva & Irva, Little and The Swallowed Man – and the YA series The Iremonger Trilogy. Little, based on the life of Madame Tussaud and published in 2018, was a Times and Sunday Times book of the year and was shortlisted for the HWA Crown and longlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize, the International Dublin Literary Award, the Walter Scott Prize and the RSL Ondaatje Prize. Born in England, Edward now lives with his family in the USA, where he teaches at the University of Texas at Austin.

MAX PORTER is the author of Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, Lanny and The Death of Francis Bacon. He lives in Bath with his family.

Praise for The Swallowed Man:

‘A thing of physical beauty … The Swallowed Man can be read as an extended metaphor about the power of art. Or perhaps it’s just a strange and hypnotic story about a man stuck inside a fish’ The Times

‘A marvellous feat of storytelling that dives deep into the madness accompanying solitude and creativity’ Daily Mail

‘Haunting … Geppetto’s voice, full of wistful overemphases and bewildered revelation, is absorbing as he takes in the oddity of his situation. And the book, sentence by sentence, offers much in which to luxuriate’ Sunday Times

‘A tale with plenty to say about prickly father–son relationships and the responsibility that comes with creation’ Mail on Sunday

‘Inspired … a riff on the entwined themes of fatherhood and creative spark’ New York Times

‘The Swallowed Man stands out among Carey’s other works … an existential fairy tale for adults told by an old artist considering the tragedy of life’ Washington Post

‘When I say that this is a beautiful book, I mean that literally – the language as well as the art … A spectacular experience’ Bill Goldstein, NBC

‘A deep and grimly whimsical exploration of what it means to be a son, a father, and an artist’ Kirkus Reviews

‘A re-imagining of Pinocchio, told from the viewpoint of the beast-entrapped Geppetto, it surprises and delights, and saddens and gladdens, from start to finish’ Big Issue

‘The Swallowed Man is a book unlike any other that I have read for many a long year. That is recommendation enough. Added to which it is written with fluent economy, poetic clarity and imaginative daring. What a high note on which to end this year of too many lows’ The Herald

‘Whimsical and macabre’ Strong Words Magazine

‘Art objects live in the belly of this marvellous novel, images swallowed by text, sustained by a sublime and loving imagination. Like all Edward Carey’s work TheSwallowed Man is profound and delightful. It is a strange and tender parable of two maddening obsessions: parenting and art-making’ Max Porter

‘Geppetto, carver of naughty Pinocchio, keeps a haunting journal of his years inside the whale … Bizarre, moving, intensely odd’ @MargaretAtwood

‘A beautiful and dark meditation on fatherhood, mercy, redemption and the alchemy of isolation. Strange, moving and musical, it’s a delight’ A. L. Kennedy

‘Strange and lovely’ Rhik Samadder

Praise for Little:

‘Startlingly original … [Carey] finds and treasures the ironies and macabre eccentricities of Tussaud’s world. The pages are also enriched by his beautiful and haunting illustrations’ A Times Book of the Year

‘Weird, wonderful and unlike any other historical novel this year’ A Sunday Times Book of the Year

‘Uniquely inventive … It is variously nightmarish, dreamy, sensual, emotionally affecting and very funny’ A Big Issue Book of the Year

‘A tale as moving as it is macabre’ Mail on Sunday

‘Rich and engrossing, there is an extraordinary potency to Carey’s material … Visceral, vivid and moving’ The Guardian

‘In this gloriously gruesome imagining of the girlhood of Marie Tussaud, mistress of wax, fleas will bite, rats will run and heads will roll and roll and roll … I bloody loved it’ The Spectator

‘A gripping novel of shy wit and darkly humorous occurrences … Mesmerising in its virtuosity’ Irish Independent

‘Clever and intriguing’ Daily Mail

‘Compelling … Carey’s story is cinematic in scope and fairy tale-like in its attention to coincidence, and to the fateful cycle of pride and fall’ TLS

‘A darkly fascinating tale packed full of vivid historical detail and quaint, engaging characters’ Sunday Express

‘By turns witty, ghoulish and poignant – a historical novel unlike any other’ BBC History Magazine

‘Poignant and absorbing’ Literary Review

‘Full of rich detail and beautiful illustrations … A rare treat that will stay with you long after you turn the final page’ Heat

‘Written with relentless energy, flair and finesse’ The Herald

‘A startlingly remarkable flight of historical fancy where fact, fiction, tragedy and Grand Guignol collide’ i Newspaper

‘Carey’s flair for macabre whimsy has drawn comparisons to Tim Burton – but while death haunts this story, Little is a novel that teems with life’ Time

‘Marie’s story is fascinating in itself, but Carey’s talent makes her journey a thing of wonder’ New York Times

‘This historical novel about the wax-sculptor who would become the world-renowned Madame Tussaud looks uncannily like a real-life classic’ Washington Post

‘Strange and delightful’ Vanity Fair

‘Don’t miss this eccentric charmer’ @MargaretAtwood

‘Absolutely brilliant’ Susan Hill

‘Little is that rare thing – a unique novel with a unique and fully realised voice, rich in deadpan wit and surgically precise observation. By turns tragic, bizarre and deeply moving, it is an absolute delight’ A. L. Kennedy

‘An utter triumph … I was blown away’ Philip Ardagh

‘Moving, dark, and occasionally heartbreaking – a book to be read by the light of a flickering candle’ Nigel Slater

A Year in Plagues & Pencils

Edward Carey

ALSO AVAILABLE FROM GALLIC BOOKS:

The Swallowed Man Little

A Year in Plagues & Pencils

Edward Carey

Pushkin Press

A Gallic Book

Text and illustrations copyright © Edward Carey, 2021

Introduction © Max Porter, 2021

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted

First published in Great Britain in 2021 by Gallic Books, 12 Eccleston St, London, SW1W 9LT

This book is copyright under the Berne Convention

No reproduction without permission

All rights reserved

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 9781805333937

Designed and typeset in Fournier MT by Jeremy Hopes

Printed in the UK by CPI (CR0 4TD)

For my mother, who I have not been able to see this long year

Contents

Foreword

Chapter 1

A Key to the Drawings

Acknowledgements

O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.

William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act II, Scene ii

FOREWORD

BY MAX PORTER

I’ve been inside Edward Carey’s house. Like Edward Carey’s Twitter feed, Edward Carey’s novels and, we must assume, Edward Carey’s brain, it is full of marvellous and intriguing things. Curios. Works of art. Strange artefacts, man-made and natural. Living things and dead things. Painted, drawn, sculpted, found on the Thames foreshore, inherited, invented, hoarded, adored. Edward is a living Kunst- und Wunderkammer and he scatters, as he goes about his creative business, a museum of wonderful things for us all to behold. He is leaving a beautiful trace.

His lockdown project is an extension of this activity. He simply must create. He has a compulsion. Like the character Geppetto in his latest novel, The Swallowed Man, if you were to trap Edward in the belly of a whale, he would surely still make art. He would fashion a brush, and paint. He has obsessions, and we are the greedy beneficiaries. The brief he set himself is simple: to sit and draw a picture every day and post it on Twitter. An ordinary B pencil, a pad of 9 × 12 Bristol vellum paper. And then he just sits and does it, while his children live and work and eat and play around him. While his wife Elizabeth is in another room creating her own magic, prevented from crossing the room because there they are, laid out, these drawings covering the floor, swallowing the house, a hundred days, two hundred days, three hundred days, like a patient paper monument to time and human experience.

A fly on Mike Pence’s creepy head takes ten minutes.

A portrait of Thomas Crapper, inventor of the U-bend and floating ballcock, might take an hour and a half.

It’s beautiful work. It makes the great mean machine of Twitter a momentarily nicer place. You land upon the carefully drawn image as you scroll through aggressions, bullish assertions, the snide, the sarcastic or the statistically devastating. The sheer roiling tragedy of modern life in a plague year in the era of Trump stops for a second: Ah look, that’s nice, that’s a pencil portrait of Georges Perec.

So there’s that – there is the ‘good person leaving a good thing on here every day’ aspect of this project. But it’s more profound than that. Edward’s drawings are a gesture. They take time, which means something in the context of Twitter’s cruel immediacy. His posts are evidence of an hour or so of careful observation, close attention and deep thought. In a year when time has gone a bit mad, when memory-making experiences (to structure our selfhood upon) have diminished