{"product_id":"the-vices-isbn-9781590514153","title":"The Vices","description":"Oliver Vice, forty-one, prominent philosopher, scholar, and art collector, is missing and presumed dead, over the side of \u003ci\u003eQueen Mary 2\u003c\/i\u003e.Troubled by his friend’s possible suicide, the unnamed narrator of Lawrence Douglas’ new novel launches an all-consuming investigation into Vice’s life history. Douglas, moving backward through time, tells a mordantly humorous story of fascination turned obsession, as his narrator peels back the layers of the Vice family’s rich and bizarre history. At the heart of the family are Francizka, Oliver’s handsome, overbearing, vaguely anti-Semitic Hungarian mother, and his fraternal twin brother, Bartholomew, a gigantic and troubled young man with a morbid interest in Europe’s great tyrants. As the narrator finds himself drawn into a battle over the family’s money and art, he comes to sense that someone—or perhaps the entire family—is hiding an unsavory past. Pursuing the truth from New York to London, from Budapest to Portugal, he remains oblivious to the irony of the search: that in his need to understand Vice’s life, he is really grappling with ambivalence about his own.“The second novel by Lawrence Douglas gave me delight on every page. I’m always careful about calling something Nabokovian, mostly because I’ll see that in a review and read the book in question and it’s fine but not as good as Nabokov, you know? But this one is Nabokovian—there is no other word.” —Ed Park, \u003ci\u003eNew York Magazine\u003c\/i\u003e, “The Year in Books”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“\u003ci\u003eThe Vices\u003c\/i\u003e…is the sharp, stylish, suspenseful tale of Oliver Vice, a charismatic philosopher and art collector, and the provincial academic who falls under his spell. More than a campus novel, it is an elegant parable about the allure of self-invention.” —Adam Kirsch, \u003ci\u003eThe New Statesman\u003c\/i\u003e, “Books of the year 2011”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Playful and profound…As dazzlingly constructed as it is limpidly told, \u003ci\u003eThe Vices \u003c\/i\u003eis a duplicitous delight that feels at home in this age of YouTube, e-mail, and the myriad other ways we consume and connect in this world…Lawrence Douglas gives conclusive evidence that he’s the real thing.” —Ed Park, \u003ci\u003eBookforum \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Smart...always fascinating...The novel’s biggest concern is how we construct personal narratives that accommodate slippery and unsteady acts of memory.” — A.P.D. Lawrie, \u003ci\u003eTimes Literary Supplement\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“In its deft exploration of the way identity, especially Jewish identity, is constructed and performed, \u003ci\u003eThe Vices\u003c\/i\u003e does justice to its elegant Nabokovian inspiration.” —Adam Kirsch,\u003ci\u003e Tablet Magazine\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“A good summer read…Making literal the phrase ‘literary sleuthing,’ [\u003ci\u003eThe Vices\u003c\/i\u003e] combines the genres of academic and mystery novel.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Buffalo News\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Douglas delivers a probing and skillful examination of the conundrums of identity…masterfully kaleidoscopic…[\u003ci\u003eThe Vices\u003c\/i\u003e] presents the reader with a stunning new vista.” —\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“An intriguing, thought-provoking exploration of a man desperately unhappy to be living his own life.” —\u003ci\u003eBooklist\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Darkly comic…[Douglas] masterly crafts a family portrait, where the paint has cracked to reveal human truths.” —Royal Young, InterviewMagazine.com\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Douglas elaborates on the inherent tensions that make up the contested borders of identity…This mystery is deceptively philosophical and introspective.” —\u003ci\u003eLibrary Journal\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“This brilliant, funny book will appeal to lovers of Jewish fiction and those who hunger to unravel mysteries.” \u003ci\u003e—ForeWord Reviews\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“At its core a mystery, \u003ci\u003eThe Vices\u003c\/i\u003e is a witty, provocative, and devilishly entertaining book. Sometimes philosophical, sometimes wildly comic, Lawrence Douglas’s latest novel plays yearning against satisfaction, prestige against authenticity, and, ultimately, the desire to be someone else against the difficulty of inhabiting self.” —Sabina Murray, author of \u003ci\u003eThe Caprices\u003c\/i\u003e and\u003ci\u003e Forgery\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Though \u003ci\u003eThe Vices\u003c\/i\u003e unfolds the complexity of its whodunit with an appealing urbanity and wryness, its central virtue is the compassionate intelligence of its depiction of pain: the anguish and secret costs of self-reinvention, and in the face of history’s miseries and deceits, the unexpected consolations of uncertainty.” —Jim Shepard, author of \u003ci\u003eLike You’d Understand, Anyway \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“Crisply told and vigorously compelling. Douglas’s bright sense of humor camouflages but does not ultimately conceal his haunting story’s menacing undertow.” —Brad Leithauser, author of \u003ci\u003eThe Art Student’s War\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Charming and exquisite, \u003ci\u003eThe Vices\u003c\/i\u003e is an urbane comedy imbued with the eccentric verve of a Wes Anderson film and the piquant nostalgia of \u003ci\u003eBrideshead Revisted\u003c\/i\u003e.  It’s also a gripping tale of fraud, compromise, and the inventive ways we survive the nightmare of history.” —Zachary Lazar, author of \u003ci\u003eSway\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A sparkling, witty, smart-set comedy, the kind where human tragedy is best faced with sexy repartee, fine cuff links, and a game of Ping-Pong.” –\u003ci\u003eCommonwealth Magazine\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eLawrence Douglas \u003c\/b\u003eteaches at Amherst College. He is the author of the novel \u003ci\u003eThe Catastrophist \u003c\/i\u003e(Other Press, 2006), a \u003ci\u003eKirkus \u003c\/i\u003eBest Book of the Year, \u003ci\u003eThe Memory of Judgment \u003c\/i\u003e(Yale University Press, 2001), a widely acclaimed study of war crimes trials; and coauthor of a book of humor, \u003ci\u003eSense and Nonsensibility \u003c\/i\u003e(Simon \u0026amp; Schuster, 2004). His writing has appeared in the \u003ci\u003eWashington Post, The New York Times Book Review, The Hudson Review, McSweeney’s, The New Yorker, \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eHarper’s. \u003c\/i\u003eA regular contributor to the \u003ci\u003eTimes Literary Supplement, \u003c\/i\u003eDouglas lives in Sunderland, Massachusetts.By the time we made it to the parking lot, we’d taken tentative strides toward sobriety. Winter in the past day had snuck up on us. I squinted into the sunlight, dagger sharp and empty of heat. A wicked wind made swirls and eddies of dust and cigarette butts. Oliver thrust his hands deeper into his pockets and bunched his shoulders, but his coat remained unzipped. He looked at me; his eyes, behind the formidable newscaster’s glasses, were tearing from the cold. A blast of wind made him nearly swallow his words. “Did I tell you that I was recently dumped by my therapist?”\u003cbr\u003e   I shook my head, suppressing a shiver.\u003cbr\u003e   “I started seeing him about two years ago, when Sophia and I got involved. He’s really an excellent therapist, smart and insightful, a dead ringer for Gene Wilder. But gradually he became so fed up with my endless frantic rehashing of the same problems, so dispirited by my compulsive tendency to seek advice which I then ignore or declare myself incapable of implementing, so perplexed by my penchant for self-examination without profitable end, and so alarmed by my inability or refusal to restrain my thoughts, which overheat and go nowhere, like\u003cbr\u003ebats flapping around a closed attic, that he recently began a session with the simple declaration, ‘I don’t think I’m helping you. I don’t think I’m capable of helping you.’ He apologized and we shook hands; I even tried to cheer him up—he did as good as job as anybody could have…”\u003cbr\u003eOliver smiled wanly and pointed a single finger toward his temple, not pistol-like, but as one might to a curious artifact in a museum: “Sick.”","brand":"Other Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46301352493285,"sku":"NP9781590514153","price":17.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781590514153.jpg?v=1767742073","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/the-vices-isbn-9781590514153","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}