The New World: A Novel

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Farrar, Straus and Giroux, May 5, 2015 - Fiction - 224 pages

An innovative story of love, decapitation, cryogenics, and memory by two of our most creative literary minds

Jorie has just received some terrible news. A phone full of missed calls and sympathetic text messages seem to indicate that her husband, Jim, a chaplain at the hospital where she works as a surgeon, is dead. Only, not quite—rather, his head has been removed from his body and cryogenically frozen. Jim awakes to find himself in an altogether unique situation, to say the least: his body gone but his consciousness alive, his only companion a mysterious, disembodied voice.
In this surreal and unexpectedly moving work, Chris Adrian and Eli Horowitz spin a tale of loss and adjustment, death and reawakening. Simultaneously fabulist and achingly human, The New World finds Jorie grieving the husband she knew while Jim wrestles with the meaning of life after death. Conceived in collaboration with Atavist Books, The New World interrogates love and loss in the digital era.

 

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About the author (2015)

Chris Adrian is the author of The Great Night, Gob's Grief, The Children's Hospital, and A Better Angel. Selected by The New Yorker as one of its 20 Under 40, he lives in Brooklyn, New York. Eli Horowitz was the managing editor and then publisher of McSweeney's for eight years. The author of The Silent History, he is also the coauthor of The Clock Without a Face, a treasure-hunt mystery, and Everything You Know Is Pong, an illustrated cultural history of Ping-Pong, and his design work has been honored by I.D., Print, and the American Institute of Graphic Arts. He lives in San Francisco.

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