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Beautiful Mutants and Swallowing Geography book cover
Beautiful Mutants and Swallowing Geography
1989
First Published
3.43
Average Rating
208
Number of Pages

From the Man Booker Prize-shortlisted author of Swimming Home, a single volume comprising her first two novels: Beautiful Mutants, long out of print, and Swallowing Geography, never before published in the United States. Beautiful Mutants, Deborah Levy's surreal first novel, introduces a manipulative and magical Russian exile who summons forth a series of grotesques—among them the Poet, the Banker, and the Anorexic Anarchist. Levy explores the anxieties that pervaded the 1980s: exile and emigration, broken dreams, crazed greed and the first seeds of the global financial crisis, self-destructive desires, and the disintegration of culture. It is a feverish allegory written in prose so beautiful and acrobatic that it could only come from a poet. This remarkable and pioneering debut is as much about language as it is the world that ensnares and alienates us. In Swallowing Geography, J. K., like her namesake Jack Kerouac, is always on the road, traveling Europe with her typewriter in a pillowcase. She wanders, meeting friends and strangers, battling her raging mother, and taking in the world through her uniquely irreverent, ironic perspective. Levy blends fairytale with biting satire, pushing at the edges of reality and marveling at where the world collapses in on itself. In this stunningly original novel, Deborah Levy searches deep into the heart of the late-twentieth century and does not hold back on what she finds there.

Avg Rating
3.43
Number of Ratings
230
5 STARS
11%
4 STARS
41%
3 STARS
30%
2 STARS
16%
1 STARS
2%
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Author

Deborah Levy
Deborah Levy
Author · 22 books

Deborah Levy trained at Dartington College of Arts leaving in 1981 to write a number of plays, highly acclaimed for their "intellectual rigour, poetic fantasy and visual imagination", including PAX, HERESIES for the Royal Shakespeare Company, CLAM, CALL BLUE JANE, SHINY NYLON, HONEY BABY MIDDLE ENGLAND, PUSHING THE PRINCE INTO DENMARK and MACBETH-FALSE MEMORIES, some of which are published in LEVY: PLAYS 1 (Methuen) Deborah wrote and published her first novel BEAUTIFUL MUTANTS (Vintage), when she was 27 years old. The experience of not having to give her words to a director, actors and designer to interpret, was so exhilarating, she wrote a few more. These include, SWALLOWING GEOGRAPHY, THE UNLOVED (Vintage) and BILLY and GIRL (Bloomsbury). She has always written across a number of art forms (see Bookworks and Collaborations with visual artists) and was Fellow in Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge from 1989-1991.

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