His freshman year of college, Alex Lemon was the star catcher on the Macalester College baseball team, the boy getting the girl, the guy at every party smoking and drinking, the kid everyone called Happy, often without even knowing his real name was Alex. But, in the spring of 1997, he had his first stroke.  

For two years he coped with his deteriorating health by sinking deeper into alcohol and drug abuse.  Maintaining a charming and carefree exterior, Lemon endured two more brain bleeds and, haunted by the sexual abuse he suffered as a small child, a crippling depression. After he undergoes risky brain surgery it is his free-spirited mother who nurses him back to health, once again teaching him to stand on his own.  

HAPPY is an electric, hypnotic self-portrait of a young man confronting mortality and the limits of his own body; it is also the deeply moving story of a mother’s redemptive and healing powers. Lemon is a brave and exhilarating writer whose Technicolor sentences make the world he describes pop and sing. In intimate, unflinching prose he writes about survival—of the body and of the human spirit.

  Successful category: Alex Lemon's searing memoir combines elements of several successful memoirs. Like Brad Land's Goat, it illuminates the emotional turmoil of a young man; like Augusten Burroughs's Dry and countless other successful memoirs HAPPY chronicles Lemon's struggle with substance abuse; and like Lucy Grealy's Autobiography of a Face Lemon writes about the physical and emotional fall out of serious illness, in his case a malformation in the brain that caused him to have a series of strokes during his freshman year of college.  

* Charismatic and well-positioned author: Alex Lemon is as electrifying in person as he is on the page and his work as a poet and his irresistible character have opened many doors. He is featured in the January issue of Esquire in a piece called the "Meaning of Life".  

*Well respected in the literary world and championed by Mark Doty, who was so taken with Lemon's first book of poems, Mosquito, that he wrote the introduction for it.  He said, "Alex Lemon makes something larger than any narration of personal experience: a container of struggle, love and delight--even for the wounded and dumb body, an undeceived, adult form of hope." We will approach a long list of other wonderful memoirists including Nick Flynn, Rick Bragg, Howard Dully, David Carr and Robin Romm.

*Prose debut by critically acclaimed poet:  Like Mary Karr, Mark Doty, and Nick Flynn Alex Lemon is a much lauded poet who can successfully shift between writing poetry and memoir. He is as talented at writing about his life as he is at creating indelible poems and his training as a poet lends his writing a rare precision and vividness. His poems have been selected for Best American Poetry and have appeared in numerous magazines, including AGNI, BOMB, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Open City, Pleiades and Tin House. Among his awards are a 2005 Literature Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts and a 2006 Minnesota Arts Board Grant.

* Impressive presence on the university circuit--the great success of Lemon's poetry and his dynamic personality are evident in the numerous invitations he receives to read. Over the last year he has done about 40 readings at schools all over the country including Princeton, Harvard, Sarah Lawrence, and The New School (full list attached).

* Online campaIgn--Lemon is web savvy and very linked in, the internet will be instrumental in promoting HAPPY. His Facebook page already has 800 friends and his Goodreads page has over 500 members.

*From The Glass Castle to Name All the Animals to Change Me into Zeus's Daughter Scribner excels at publishing memoirs.

 

Alex Lemon was born in Iowa, and lives in Ft. Worth, Texas. He is the author of two collections of poetry, Mosquito (Tin House Books) and Hallelujah Blackout (Milkweed Editions), and is the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Prasa o książce: 

“One of our time’s most compelling memoirs…..An electrifying portrait of a body in crisis, and the way the soul is inexorably, reluctantly dragged along. [Lemon] has staked out his own frontier—the land of the ridiculous sublime, a country that is at the same time both wildly playful and deeply felt.” –Esquire

“This one is something special….This is the story of a boy and his mother, but one whose tenderness sneaks up on you while you're distracted by all the blood and booze and hollering. The two of them can talk about nearly anything, but don't always have to. What Lemon and his mom have is that rarest of things in a trauma memoir, a parent-child relationship that is more than merely ‘functional.’ It's funkily, goofily, supremely life-affirming. Make that lifesaving.”—Laura Miller, Salon.com

“Dazzling….. An unnervingly intimate, relentlessly poetic recounting of debauchery, trauma and healing, Alex Lemon’s memoir is cut from the same cloth as David Carr’s The Night of the Gun or James Frey’s discredited A Million Little Pieces. But whereas those autobiographies reveled in the seamy details accompanying the wild life, Happy is far more concerned with the party’s aftermath….There are few modern works that so elegantly capture a mind and, by extension, a life on the verge of disintegration.”–Fort Worth Star-Telegram

“Alex Lemon makes Happy harrowing and upbeat, writing with a poet's touch about the illness that overtook his jock life….Nonfiction writers and poets have a secret alliance -- working toward defining a truth instead of making it up. So when we get a twofer of a poet writing memoir, the results trend toward glinting precision.”--Karen Schechner, Cleveland Plain Dealer

The Daily Beast named Happy one of the 10 best books of January. “Recounted with surprising humor in this memoir about one man’s struggle to overcome the unexpected.”–The Daily Beast

“Lemon is a compelling and inventive writer….Since we know the ending (he lives to write his memoir, after all), it's a credit to Lemon's storytelling ability that he keeps readers engaged to the end.”–Associated Press

“Happy is graphically raw and in-your-face; Lemon's dexterity with words forces the reader into gritty latitudes no one would visit voluntarily, and the level of detail will cause some readers to squirm. But Happy is an honest voyage into Lemon's keen mind, remarkable spirit and loving heart, and it shouldn't be missed.”– Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Poet Lemon packs the poignant wallop of a sprawling Dickensian novel with his taut, speedy memoir.”--Denver Post

 "A short, fast, punchy read.”–PortlandOregonian

Publishers Weekly

In this honest memoir, Lemon, the author of two collections of poetry (Mosquito; Hallelujah Blackout), was a carefree, hard partying, baseball-playing college student at Macalester College in Minnesota in 1997 when he suffered a stroke and later two brain bleeds. Readers are swept along on his rough ride during the next two years, through his nasty travails of frenetic drug and alcohol use, terribly misguided attempts to cope with his deteriorating and frightening condition. Often he is mean and uncaring to those around him; at other times he is confused and scared. He drops into a dark depression, a cruel fate for a young man, who was known on campus by the nickname of Happy. Ultimately, he undergoes brain surgery. Lemon offers a raw and honest narration of his college life, his relationships with girlfriends and family members, especially his loving and quirky mother. He dissects his repressed inner demons and recounts his continual struggle to regain his emotional and physical health following his operation. The result is a voltaic narrative that is alternately horrifying and touching.

 “The pyrotechnic prose of Alex Lemon’s memoir creates an electrifying portrait of a body in crisis, and the way the soul is inexorably, reluctantly, dragged along. By the last mesmerizing page it is not merely the limits of the body that have been revealed, but a deeper truth—how becoming a man can sometimes mean holding the mother, who has been pushed away, ever closer. If ever a book was written in blood, it is this one.” —Nick Flynn, author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City

 

With a gift for startling description, Alex Lemon chronicles his transformation — through the awful experience of a brain stem lesion and radical surgery — from a damaged, self-hating boy to a resilient, emotionally alive adult. He takes his reader inside the terror and strangeness of illness — and gives us, along the way, a loving portrait of a devoted, wonderfully nutty mother. Lemon is a brave, headlong writer, and he captures the life of the body with vivid and memorable intensity.—Mark Doty, author of Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems And DOG YEARS

Link do autora: http://www.alexlemon.com/

Autor: Alex Lemon

Data dodania: 2010-01-17