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Empty Wigs by Jonathan Meades (Hardback)
£25.00
Available
Product Ref. (e.g. ISBN, SKU)
9781800183247
Published:
06 Feb 2025
Format:
Hardback
Number of pages:
1008 pages
Dimensions:
240x159mm
Weight:
0.000kgs
Author:
Empty Wigs is a hallucinatory ride through the twentieth century that will cement Jonathan Meades as one of the great literary writers of our age. It moves from bloody Algiers in 1962 to the Marches in the late nineteenth century, from Lüneburg Heath to suburban southern England. Its characters are damned and doomed. They exert free will so make terrible choices. Their appetites are base. Their lives are without end. They lurch to extremes. From euthanasia to terrorism and political assassination, with secrets and betrayals, great gothic houses and pseudo-scientific experiments, Empty Wigs is a vast compendium of tales from the jungle of existence which show humankind at its most abject. Many of its stories are bleak, perverse, harrowing. Many are tragically farcical. But the writing is neon-rich, gorgeous and baroque, funny and joyfully offensive. Told through frames within frames, mazes within mazes, colliding narratives and quick cha
Empty Wigs is a hallucinatory ride through the twentieth century that will cement Jonathan Meades as one of the great literary writers of our age.
It moves from bloody Algiers in 1962 to the Marches in the late nineteenth century, from Lüneburg Heath to suburban southern England. Its characters are damned and doomed. They exert free will so make terrible choices. Their appetites are base. Their lives are without end. They lurch to extremes. From euthanasia to terrorism and political assassination, with secrets and betrayals, great gothic houses and pseudo-scientific experiments, Empty Wigs is a vast compendium of tales from the jungle of existence which show humankind at its most abject.
Many of its stories are bleak, perverse, harrowing. Many are tragically farcical. But the writing is neon-rich, gorgeous and baroque, funny and joyfully offensive. Told through frames within frames, mazes within mazes, colliding narratives and quick changing moods, Empty Wigs is a late modern masterpiece and a return to the novel's origins.
'Three hundred and whatever glorious and on occasion incomprehensible words . . . In every sense, a mag. op.' Jonathon Green, editor of Green's Dictionary of Slang
'I was remind of a huge museum of taxidermy with all the characters duly fucked and stuffed accordingly. Bravo' Chris Petit, author of The Psalm Killer
About the Author: Jonathan Meades is a writer, journalist, essayist and film-maker. His books include three works of fiction - Filthy English, Pompey and The Fowler Family Business - and several collections including Museum Without Walls, which received thirteen nominations as a book of the year in 2012. An Encyclopaedia of Myself was shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley Prize and longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2014. His first and only cookbook, The Plagiarist in the Kitchen, was published in 2017. Pedro and Ricky Come Again (2021) was the sequel to Peter Knows What Dick Likes (1988). Meades has written and performed in more than sixty highly acclaimed television films on predominantly topographical subjects such as shacks, garden cities, megastructures, buildings associated with vertigo, beer, pigs, and the architecture of Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and Franco. He also creates artknacks and treyfs. Treyf means impure, not kosher: it sums up his approach to all writing, film and art.
| Number of pages | 1008 |
|---|
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| EU | £15.00 | £30.00 |
| USA & Canada | £30.00 | £50.00 |
| Rest of the World | £45.00 | £60.00 |
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