{"product_id":"after-james-isbn-9781941040416","title":"After James","description":"\u003cb\u003eFor fans of Joshua Cohen and Ben Lerner, \u003ci\u003eAfter James\u003c\/i\u003e captures the dystopian strangeness of our current world.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA neuroscientist walks out of her life and isolates herself in the woods, intending to blow the whistle on a pharmaceutical company and its creativity drug gone wrong. A recently orphaned graduate school dropout is hired as a “literary detective” to decode the work of a mysterious Internet poet who writes about disappearances and murders with an inexplicably precise knowledge of private details. And a virologist discovers her identity has been stolen by a conceptual artist in whose stories someone always goes missing. Ali, James, and Celia exist in worlds where implausibilities that once belonged to science fiction, ancient superstition, or dystopian visions are real or impending. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSet in great cities, remote regions, and deadly borderlands, Michael Helm’s groundbreaking novel, \u003ci\u003eAfter James\u003c\/i\u003e, is told in three parts, each gesturing toward a type of genre fiction: the gothic horror, the detective novel, and the apocalyptic. Science and art become characters, and secrets form, hidden in the codes of genetic sequences, poems, and the patterns of political violence. Part to part, elements repeat―otherworldly weather, disturbing artwork, buried corpses―and amid these echoes, a larger mystery arises, one that joins artifice to nature, and fiction to reality, delivering us into the troubling wonder of the present world.\u003cb\u003eIn After James, Michael Helm brings his acute, soulful intelligence to bear on the question of how we live now.\u003c\/b\u003e He powerfully evokes the isolation embedded in our relentless hyper-connectedness. He gives us his lonely, disappearing people through a dazzling and intricate array of fictional lenses. The global and the local collapse and expand again. Language reveals its particulate secrets. Patterns are noted (or imagined). He shows us the poignancy in our human need to make sense and the distortions that come from our endless desire for answers.   — Dana Spiotta, author of INNOCENTS AND OTHERS\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBy turns \u003cb\u003eharrowing and memorable\u003c\/b\u003e, Helm’s tales resonate in an age of Internet trolling and corrupt pharmaceutical companies, in which art and science blur ethical boundaries.   — Booklist\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHelm's execution is so masterful that it made for \u003cb\u003eone of the most satisfying reading experiences I've had in years\u003c\/b\u003e . . . After James is a new high-water mark in Helm's already remarkable oeuvre, and solidifies him as one of Canada's most interesting and challenging novelists.   — Quill and Quire, Starred\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn this kaleidoscopic novel the real and the unreal spiral and collide to reveal just how thin the line between truth and fiction really is. Combining elements or horror, mystery, and sci-fi, Helm has crafted a literary wormhole. Let yourself fall through. \u003cb\u003eYou won’t be the same on the other side.\u003c\/b\u003e   — Emily Ballaine, Green Apple Books\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003eAfter James\u003c\/b\u003e  \u003cb\u003ereminds me of the best of Hawthorne and Poe\u003c\/b\u003e—Helm crafts a masterful novel with characters whose realities melt around them. Unreliable narrators are child’s play to him: what he creates so vividly are unreliable worlds, stitched together with the creeping assertion that the objects of our perception may be as deceptive as our minds.   — Tristan Charles, Parnassus Books\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHelm’s triptych of characters haunted by menacing intelligences that seem to read their minds at every turn is so \u003cb\u003emenacingly intelligent\u003c\/b\u003e that I finished it looking over my shoulder to if Helm was reading my mind. And then I turned back to the first page to start reading again.      — Tom Nissley, Phinney Books\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eMichael Helm’s dazzlingly creative work almost defies categorization\u003c\/b\u003e. A novel in three distinct, seemingly (or not) unrelated parts, told from different points of view by unreliable narrators with waking dreams. I reveled in the language and the mystery and let it wash over me as I did Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life.   — Marion Abbott, Mrs. Dalloways\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAfter James is \u003cb\u003ea twenty-first century master class in the use of genre\u003c\/b\u003e to explore our ever-changing, and ever-slipping, grasp on reality. Helm draws on a base of knowledge broad and deep, from etymology to neuropharmaceuticals, from poetry to cybersecurity, to craft three murkily connected tales that point toward the best kind of cosmic disquiet: beyond comprehension and just out of sight.   — Christopher Phipps, DIESEL, A Bookstore in Oakland\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAfter James is a weird, fantastical read which combines elements of science fiction, mystery, and horror and creates \u003cb\u003ea wholly original and expertly crafted novel and easily one of my favorite reads of 2016.\u003c\/b\u003e   — LitReactor\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDense, fascinating, and genre-defying . . . [After James] not only raises profound questions about the nature of life and imagination in the modern world, but actually dares to answer them.   — The Literary Review\u003cb\u003eMichael Helm\u003c\/b\u003e was born in Saskatchewan. His novel \u003ci\u003eCities of Refuge\u003c\/i\u003e was a national bestseller in Canada and was a Rogers Writers’ Trust Ficiton Award finalist, a Giller Prize nominee, and a \u003ci\u003eGlobe and Mail \u003c\/i\u003eand\u003ci\u003e Now\u003c\/i\u003e magazine Best Book of the Year. His earlier novels are \u003ci\u003eThe Projectionist\u003c\/i\u003e, a finalist for the Giller Prize and the Trillium Award; and\u003ci\u003e In the Place of Last Things\u003c\/i\u003e, a finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book. His writings on fiction, poetry, and the visual arts have appeared in North American newspapers and magazines, including \u003ci\u003eBrick\u003c\/i\u003e, where he serves as an editor. He teaches at York University in Toronto.","brand":"Tin House","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48232909799653,"sku":"NP9781941040416","price":15.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781941040416.jpg?v=1767721100","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/after-james-isbn-9781941040416","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}