Hold Fast Your Crown: A Novel

(Hardback)

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Description

An exasperated writer obsessed with American cinema embarks on an increasingly bizarre journey in this heady, engrossing novel. A man writes an enormous screenplay on the life of Herman Melville. Not a single producer is interested in it. One day, someone gives him the phone number of the great American filmmaker Michael Cimino, legendary director of The Deer Hunter and Heaven's Gate. A meeting is arranged in New York, and Cimino reads the manuscript. What follows is a series of crazy adventures through Ellis Island, the Musee de la Chasse in Paris, a lake in Italy. We run into Isabelle Huppert, Diana the hunting goddess, a Dalmatian named Sabbat, a diabolical neighbor, and two shady characters with conspicuous mustaches. There's also a pretty PhD student, an unpleasant concierge, and an aggressive ma tre d' who looks like Emmanuel Macron... This improbable, insightful tale bridges the divide between cinema and literature in unexpected ways that are at once gratifying and profound.

Reviews

Shortlisted for the 2017 Prix Goncourt

A story of madness, art, alcohol and creativityelegantly translatedvivid. New York Times

[An] audacious novelThe books charm lies in its determination to take outlandish risks. The New Yorker

[A] unique, ecstatic novel. Wall Street Journal

Entertaining. New York Times Book Review

The delightfully deluded protagonist of [Hold Fast Your Crown] juggles high and pop culture references with aplomb and a light touchThis is a stimulating novel, full of mischief and clever curveballs. Publishers Weekly

This wildly ambitious novel audaciously layers on metaphors that explore truth, film and art, and the essence of life. Booklist

Hold Fast Your Crown is French literature at its bestit works, in no small measure thanks to Haenels strange and haunting prosestimulatingbeautiful and memorable. PopMatters

Undeniably dazzlinga remarkable, sustained, high-wire act, a book that seems constantly to teeter on the edge of disaster without ever quite succumbing. Hold Fast Your Crown thrives on Haenels buoyant prose. New York Journal of Books

Crazy, brilliant, addictive, and darkly poetic. Le Figaro

Wonderfully mad. Le Parisien

A wild novel, a blaze of astounding images. LObs

Intensea book of visions, fantasies, and obsessions. Le Monde

Written on the razors edge, in a perpetual tension, this profound and hallucinatory book is a firecracker. Le Canard enchan

A literary fever and fervor that speak volumes. Lire

Author Bio

Yannick Haenel is the author of several novels, including Introduction la mort fran aise and voluer parmi les avalanches. The Messenger, published in France under the title Jan Karski, won the Prix Interallie and the Prix du roman FNAC in 2009.In Paris in 1997, he cofounded the avant-garde literary journal Ligne de risque. Teresa Lavender Fagan is a freelance translator. She has published more than a dozen book-length translations, including Jean Bottero's The Oldest Cuisine in the World- Cooking in Mesopotamia and Catherine Cusset's Life of David Hockney, forthcoming from Other Press.