Talking Man

From Publishers Weekly Having dreamt this world into being, the wizard called "Talking Man" falls in love with what he has made and retires there. He lives in a house trailer on a Kentucky hillside close by his junkyard, and he only uses magic on the rare occasions he can't fix a car the other way. He'd be there still if his jealous codreamer Dgene hadn't decided to undo his creation and return this world to nothingness. When Talking Man lights out to stop her, his daughter Crystal and chance-acquaintance William Williams give chase into a West that changes around them. The geography shimmers and melts, catfish big as boats are pulled from the Mississippi, the moon crumbles into luminous rings and refugees from burning cities choke the highways. A novel of the new South with a liberal dose of the old, fantastic and gothic, a road novel leading to the city at the end of time, a postmodern, Sam Shepard, apocalpseone you can drive to in a '62 Chrysler New Yorkerthis is a charming, literate, laconic tale, deceptively brief, teasingly allusive and very entertaining. From the inside flap Crystal just wanted to set her tobacco and find her father, who was obviously in a lot of trouble. Williams just wanted a car and a girlfriend. Neither of them dreamed that they were about to begin a strange odyssey in a '62 Chrysler across a shape-shifting America, down the mile-deep Mississippi Canyon choked with traffic, through burning cities and moonlit junkyards, across the wolf-haunted borders of Canada north to the sombre city, Edminidine, at the world's end where, even now, Destiny is being decided with shotguns and Wizard war. "Terry Bisson's Talking Man is a delightful and flawless book. Like James M. Cain, Bisson adds odd and practical information as he entertains; we learn how to plant tobacco and how to fix a shattered windshield with gunk. Also like James M. Cain, Bisson gives us remarkable characters, astonishing images, and a truly marvelousmagicalstory. I don't really hate Terry Bisson for writing this book. Let's just call it sheer envy."George Alec Effinger "Terry Bisson has considerable talent and originality. Talking Man displays both these qualities in abundance. The book is marvellously readable, completely absorbing. I enjoyed it a great deal and was particularly impressed by the wonderfully idiosyncratic use of 20th century (especially Southern) iconography. Talking Man turns the familiar into something exotic and makes the exotic seem familiar, which is what the best fantasy has always done."Michael Moorcock "Any novel that encompasses John Deere tractors, tobacco planting in the deep south, wizards at the end of time, a six-mile-wide Mississippi River Canyon, singing magic, and a Chrysler racing to the North Pole is covering an awful lot of ground. In Talking Man , Terry Bisson covers that ground asif it were the most natural thing in this world, or any other. A highly entertaining piece of work."Guy Gavriel Kay "Terry Bisson's Talking Man is unique: a phantasmagoric automotive odyssey recounted in a vivid, visual style that makes the outrageous believable and the commonplace upsettingly spooky."Michael Bishop "A too-bright, too-big moon shines down on a ragtag Kentucky wizard, a '62 Chrysler, and the damndest Mason jar you ever saw. And it's real all of it. But watch out. Talking Man will ease into your mind like Southern Comfortand turn the world you live in upside down."Sharon Webb "I was utterly surprisedand charmedby Bisson's melding of the world of romance and the ironic world of Kentucky-Tennessee grocery stores and pickup trucks. Fantasy is full of wizards from the beginning and end of time, but who ever thought to put one in a Kentucky junk yard or have him use magic to replace a broken gear in a '62 Chrysler New Yorker's oil pump so he wouldn't have to pull the oil pan?... The book's real appeal is just that it's so damn well written. This is the kind of book that makes you smile all the way to the last page with plain old satisfaction at how carefully each word's been polished and placed to make the sentences sing like Talking Man himselfspell-casting at its finest."Russell Griffin Formats : EPUB ϡ쯦랠