Lesser Ruins

Lesser Ruins is a novel of delirious obsession, following a retired professor's quest to create a book that will stand as a towering cathedral to Michel de Montaigne. It explores themes of ambition, grief, and the ecstatic search for meaning through art, laced with humor and absurdity.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 296 pages
Publication date: 21 November 2024
Publisher: Coffee House Press

From the author of "Reinhardt's Garden" and "Saint Sebastian's Abyss" comes a breathless new novel of delirious obsession. Bereft after the death of his ailing wife, a retired professor has resumed his life's work—a book that will stand as a towering cathedral to Michel de Montaigne, reframing the inventor of the essay for the modern age. The challenge is the litany of intrusions that bar his way—from memories of his past to the nattering of smartphones to his son's relentless desire to make an electronic dance album. As he sifts through the contents of his desk, his thoughts pulsing and receding in a haze of caffeine, ghosts and grievances spill out across the page. From the community college where he toiled in vain to an artists' colony in the Berkshires, from the endless pleasures of coffee to the finer points of Holocaust art, the professor's memories churn with sculptors, poets, painters, and inventors, all obsessed with escaping both mediocrity and themselves. Laced with humor as acrid as it is absurd, "Lesser Ruins" is a spiraling meditation on ambition, grief, and humanity's ecstatic, agonizing search for meaning through art.

Weight: 308g
Dimension: 129 x 197 x 19 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781566897198