Books.org participates in affiliate programs including Bookshop.org and the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. We may earn a commission from qualifying purchases made through links on this page, at no additional cost to you.
Synopsis
In this adventurous exploration of the "I" in American culture, Ander Monson grapples with the lure of self-interest and self-presentation. While setting out to describe his service as head juror at the trial of Michael Antwone Jordan, he can't help but veer off into an examination of his own transgressions, inadvertent and otherwise. He filters his private experience of the public funeral ceremony for Gerald R. Ford through the music of New Order. He considers his attraction to the chemically concocted flavors of Doritos and his disappointment in the plain, natural corn chip, and finds that the manufactured, artificial form, at least in snacks, is ultimately a more rewarding experience than the "truth."
Witty, winning, and expansive, Vanishing Point tunnels through the memoir as genre and emerges as something else entirely. Visit otherelectricities.com/vp for detours, definitions, redactions, explanations, the ongoing evolution of the essay as a form.
The Barnes & Noble Review
From Paul Di Filippo's "SMALL PRESS SPOTLIGHT" column on Barnes & Noble Review
In the realm of the small presses, thirty-six years amounts to a geological era. To survive and flourish for nearly four decades is a proud accomplishment that is denied all but a few firms. Examples of contemporary indie publishers still vibrant at the outer edge of small press longevity include City Lights (founded 1953), Burning Deck (founded 1961), and Fiction Collective/FC2 (founded 1973). Just a tad younger than the youngest in that list comes Graywolf Press, established in 1974 by Scott Walker.
A non-profit since the middle of the nineteen-eighties, Graywolf has made its sterling reputation in the realm of fiction, poetry, memoirs and literary criticism. Their available backlist constitutes nearly three hundred titles spread across a wide range of styles and themes, and they regularly issue upwards of twenty new books per year. Partnered in various ventures with the College of Saint Benedict, enjoying a solid base in the nation's three-wolf-moon heartland of Minnesota, Graywolf has proven that quality endures.
In Vanishing Point, Ander Monson has built himself a haunted labyrinth of identity confusion, at the center of which lurks a Minotaur named "Ander Monson." These recondite yet compellingly readable essays take off from simple journalistic launchpads -- reporting for jury duty, Googling one's own name, recalling the juvenile delights of Dungeons & Dragons -- but quickly enter a heady stratosphere where the interior life of the narrator bleeds out into the social networks that dominate our 21st-century life. Summoning up echoes of DavidFoster Wallace, Mark Dery and Douglas Rushkoff, Monson doggedly dissects the meaning of character and personality, using himself as lab rat. It's a bravura and scary self-spelunking.