Pan

(Hardback)

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A strange and brilliant teenager's first panic attacks lead him down the rabbit hole in this wild, highly anticipated debut novel from one of our most distinctive literary minds Nicholas is fifteen when he forgets how to breathe. He already has plenty of reasons to feel unstable- he's been living with his dad in the bleak Chicago suburbs since his mum kicked him. Then one day in geometry class, Nicholas suddenly realises that his hands are objects. The doctor says it's just panic, but Nicholas suspects that his real problem might not be a psychiatric one- maybe the Greek god Pan is trapped inside his body. As his paradigm for his own consciousness crumbles, Nicholas, his best friend, Ty, and his maybe-girlfriend, Sarah, hunt for answers why - in Oscar Wilde and in Charles Baudelaire, in rock 'n' roll and in Bach, and in the mysterious, drugged-out barn where their classmate Tod's charismatic older brother Ian leads the high schoolers in rituals that might end up breaking more than just the law. Thrilling, cerebral and startlingly funny, Pan is a new masterpiece of the coming-of-age genre by Guggenheim fellow and literary scholar Michael Clune, whose memoir of heroin addiction, White Out - named one of the New Yorker's best books of the year - earned him a cult readership. Now, in Pan, the great novel of our age of anxiety, Clune drops us inside the human psyche, where we risk discovering that the forces controlling our inner lives could be more alien than we want to let ourselves believe.

Reviews

Michael Clune writes lucid, shrewd, startling prose capable of laying bare pockets of human experience that might otherwise go without words. Pan proves his mesmeric ability to return our world and selves to us made strange and changed; there is no other writer like him -- Maggie Nelson
I steal language and ideas from Michael Clune -- Ben Lerner
A strange, vivid and intense novel about the mystery of consciousness and the magic of childhood -- Tao Lin
This strange anti-love child of Arthur Machen, Philip K. Dick and William S. Burroughs infected my brain with odd humor, paranoia and existential dread. Bursting with truly breathtaking prose, Pan is an ontological coming of age story for, well, the ages -- Paul Tremblay
No one writes like Michael Clune. His uncanny ability to fuse the universal with the arcane breaks new ground for the bildungsroman in Pan, where he dexterously stacks up spinning plates until, before you know it, theres nothing left but changeling magic. I didnt want the book to end, and Im still trying to figure out how it transformed the inscrutable doom of adolescence into a symphonic odyssey with style to spare -- Blake Butler

Author Bio

Michael Clune is the critically acclaimed author of the memoirs Gamelife and White Out, chosen by the New Yorker as one of the best books of 2013. Clune's work has appeared in Harper's, the New Yorker, Granta and elsewhere, while he has been recognised by fellowships and awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities, and others. He is currently the Samuel B. and Virginia C. Knight Professor of the Humanities at Case Western Reserve University and lives in Cleveland Heights, Ohio.