Childish Loves
By (Author) Benjamin Markovits
Faber & Faber
Faber & Faber
1st September 2012
Main
United Kingdom
General
Fiction
813.6
Paperback
416
Width 126mm, Height 198mm, Spine 26mm
318g
When the narrator of Childish Loves inherits a colleague Peter's writings on Lord Byron, he finds himself acting as a literary sleuth. Sorting through boxes of manuscripts he reads between the lines of these scandalous, Byron-inspired stories, meets with the Society for the Publication of the Dead, and tracks down people from Peter's past in an effort to untangle rumour from reality. In the process, he crafts a masterful story-within-a-story that turns on uncomfortable questions about childhood and sexual awakening, innocence and attraction, while exploring the lives of three very different writers and their brushes with success and failure in both literature and life.
Benjamin Markovits grew up in Texas, London and Berlin. He left an unpromising career as a professional basketball player to study the Romantics. Since then he has taught high school English, edited a left-wing cultural magazine and written essays, stories and reviews for, among other publications, The New York Times, The Guardian, The London Review of Books and the Paris Review. He has written four previous novels, The Syme Papers, Either Side of Winter, Imposture and A Quiet Adjustment. Markovits has lived in London since 2000 and is married with a daughter and a son. He teaches creative writing at Royal Holloway, University of London.