Details

ISBN-10: 1643620274
ISBN-13: 9781643620275
Publisher: Nightboat Books
Publish Date: 07/07/2020
Dimensions: 6.90" L, 4.70" W, 0.50" H

Skyland

Paperback

Price: $12.95

Overview

On the Greek island of Patmos, where St. John received the Book of Revelation, two writers find themselves mired in an uneasy sense of timelessness, where history and the present jumble together. As they hunt for a lost portrait of the iconic gay novelist Hervé Guibert, they discover that the island’s insistent isolation from the global catastrophe surrounding it, from the refugees interned on nearby Samos to the fascist rise in Europe and the United States, is more pose than reality.

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Reviews

Durbin's loose, impressionistic novella–about a writer who visits the Greek island of Patmos to find a painting of the cult novelist Hervé Guibert–offers many of the sly insights and scabrous pleasures of Guibert's own work.–Daniel E. Slotnik, The New York Times

Epochs collide in Skyland: ancient Greece, Paris at the peak of the AIDS crisis, Summer 2017 on Patmos, and, for today's readers, the moment of racial reckoning we're witnessing now.–Landon Mitchell, GAYLETTER

In Durbin's lush, languid novella (after MacArthur Park), a writer flies to Greece in search of a painting while romanticizing its subject, the French writer Herve Guibert, who died of AIDS in 1991... Durbin's dreamy, sensual odyssey gamely harkens back to a bygone era in gay lit.–Publishers Weekly

Guibert has even inspired (fictional) pilgrims, as he once predicted; in Andrew Durbin's novella Skyland (Nightboat), two young men search for a lost portrait of the writer on the island of Patmos.–Julian Lucas, The New Yorker

Certainly, there is more than meets the eye in this slim novella. Skyland tells a story of lust and desire – for men, sure, but for something more complex, too. It's a story about reaching new planes of discovery within one's creative practice. Ultimately, Durbin is most interested in pushing the boundaries of what is considered fiction.–Josh Vigil, Full Stop

Haunting and beautiful and full of phantoms past and present, Skyland rewrites the mythic.–Chloe Aridjis

Based in part on Guibert's posthumously published Paradise, Skyland is a dreamy odyssey haunted by a central absence, the kind of tragedy of longing that the French writer perfected.–Daniel Drake, New York Review of Books

Durbin's is the kind of lackadaisical trip where you drink retsina for breakfast, chase patchy internet to cruise men on the apps, meet a French stranger on the beach and take him up a nearby hill to fuck in private...The book revels in its loose, unfinished quality, weaving tidbits from Guibert's life and work together with more immediate impressions and anecdotes.–Lidija Haas, Harper's Magazine

In Skyland, Andrew Durbin searches for the final image, an icon: the portrait of a writer who wrote his death. Durbin's inner necessity exceeds the bounds of his story–swimming, dining, finding sex, getting in trouble. He's on a Grecian holiday with his buddy Shiv, they're tourists, right? But Durbin's anticipation conveys a sense of faith–faith in what?–in his life-in-death or death-in-life, in a fiction that gives him access to the present. History falls away till it comes crashing through, as is its wont. Reality and unreality trade places, then trade back again. A boat finally arrives–to ferry them across Styx to the underworld, across Lethe to oblivion, or across the East Aegean to the next party beach.–Robert Glück

Gusty, luminous, elegiac, and unexpectedly moving, Skyland is a languidly-paced meditation on the fecundity of objects (be they imagined or finally discovered) and a quietly hedonic seaside travelogue. While the quest for the lost portrait of Hervé Guibert keeps things taut, the scantness of events otherwise is a joy–the book's amplitude is manifest in an economy of details, mostly visual descriptions, rendered in decisive, elegantly understated prose.–Harry Dodge

"Andrew Durbin gives us all the information we will need to make it in the precarious margins of the art world: parables of love and drugs, evidence of the impending apocalypse, and play-by-plays of the cocktail and conference banter of the powerful."–Lucy Ives

"One of the few younger writers brazen enough to take up Gary Indiana's velvet-lined gauntlet, Andrew Durbin steals from the master's toolbox only to construct something entirely his own, personal or, rather, 'personal.'"–Bruce Hainley

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Details

ISBN-10: 1643620274
ISBN-13: 9781643620275
Publisher: Nightboat Books
Publish Date: 07/07/2020
Dimensions: 6.90" L, 4.70" W, 0.50" H
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