Mark Z. Danielewski's The Familiar (Volume 4) brilliantly combines inventive visuals and a paradigm-shifting narrative to create a stunning multisensory reading experience.Mark Z. Danielewski's The Familiar, Volume 4 brilliantly combines inventive visuals and a paradigm-shifting narrative to create a stunning multisensory reading experience.The Familiar Volume 1Wherein the cat is found .. .The FamiliarVolume2Wherein the cat is hungry ...The FamiliarVolume 3Wherein the cat is blind .. .The FamiliarVolume4Wherein the cat is toothless .. .When a viral video puts twelve-year-old Xanther under a spotlight of scrutiny at school, her little white cat-still slumbering, still unnamed-offers the only escape, though it comes at a price. Not even Xanther'sparents can deny the strange currents now shuddering around their eldest, touching off inexplicable happenings. Entities troubling the dreams of the twins seem to have singled out Freya. Despite invitations to a gala at The Met, Anwar fears the solution to their financial difficulties might expose more than just his family to dangerous consequences. Something greater is at hand, something terrible is at stake. And all the while, faces unfamiliar to the Ibrahims draw closer and closer- Jingjing, in Singapore, clutching charms, boards a plane for Los Angeles; Cas and Bobby, with visions of Xanther in Mefisto's Orb, must elude attacks from the sky. Strangers collide . . . though will those intersections lead to alliances or war? And does the dance at the center of Volume 4 augur the liberation of our better angels or the release of a creature set to feast on the wings of hope?THE FAMILIARcontinuesThe FamiliarVolume5Wherein the cat is named ...
FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand NewCreating a stunning multisensory experience for the reader, Familiar: Volume 4 is a modern fantasy fiction tale that has its hopes of escape pinned on an unnamed little white cat.
MARK Z. DANIELEWSKI was born in New York City and now lives in Los Angeles.
Praise for Mark Z. Danielewski's The Familiar
"The series at times recalls Ulysses, Infinite Jest, and Cloud Atlas in its complexity, structure, and echoing parallel narratives. . . . The literary world is stronger for having boundary pushers like Danielewski." —Ryan Vlastelica, The A.V. Club
"So perfectly relatable, so beautifully rendered. . . . So, so worth it in the way that reading [The Familiar] rewires your brain." —Jason Sheehan, NPR Books
"Graphic design works in tandem with storytelling in this fascinating, ongoing, humongous experiment with form and the experience of reading." —John Freeman, The Boston Globe
"[The Familiar] is a 'remediation' of television series like Twin Peaks and Breaking Bad . . . resembles Altman-inflected movies . . . or the time and place-skipping novels of David Mitchell. . . . I'm definitely in." —Tom LeClair, The New York Times Book Review
"Danielewski has somehow created a format, an experience, that mimics the best of the digital future we've been told to expect, while exploiting the best of print, that which we've been told to mourn. . . . The Familiar is a tour de force." —Allison K. Hill, Los Angeles Daily News
"[Danielewski is] the most aggressively avant-garde popular writer working today. . . . The Familiar is as much a narrative story as it is an experiment in visual and typographical forms. . . . It all adds up to something between a graphic novel and a novel-novel." —Cady Drell, Newsweek
"The author is innovating wildly not only with text but also with narrative flow, structure, and multiplicity of meaning. Loose, imagistic words are followed by tightly layered prose and pictures; this varied density creates a deeply nuanced reading experience that works. A must-read." —Library Journal (starred review)
"A marvel of postmodern storytelling." —Kirkus Reviews
"This is a book you cannot miss—because there's simply nothing else like it." —Jefferson Grubbs, Bustle
Mark Z. Danielewski's The Familiar (Volume 4) brilliantly combines inventive visuals and a paradigm-shifting narrative to create a stunning multisensory reading experience.
Praise for Mark Z. Danielewski's
Mark Z. Danielewski's The Familiar (Volume 4) brilliantly combines inventive visuals and a paradigm-shifting narrative to create a stunning multisensory reading experience.
The questions, discussion topics, and reading list that follow are intended to enhance your reading group's conversation of The Familiar, Volume 4: Hades , Mark Z. Danielewski's entrancing new novel, which continues to trace the paths of nine diverse characters as the Season One Finale approaches in Volume 5 . Feel free to wander in your discussions as you share different perspectives and explore the increasing interconnections and mysteries within this vast world.
1. Hades is both the ruler and the realm of the dead. What ghosts are (re)visited in TFv4 ? Do you think the play Hades is a metaphor for something in the novel? If Astair is Demeter and Xanther is Persephone, who is Hades? What is the relation between Hades and cages, one of the keywords for this volume? 2. Danielewski has said that The Familiar would have been "impossible to conceive had it not been for the sudden efflorescence of great television" (NPR interview). Now that there are four volumes and the finale for the first season is on the horizon (Fall 2017), compare your experience in reading this novel with your experience watching one of the "big" televisual narratives such as The Wire, Game of Thrones, Mad Men, or Breaking Bad. What is it like to read a new volume every 6-8 months? In what sense does Danielewski seem to function like a showrunner? What are the similarities and differences between serial television and a serial novel in today''s media landscape? 3. The word "clip" appears throughout TFv4-- as the vignettes Cas views in the orb (pp. 235-238), as the video of the lioness running at Xanther (pp. 142, 211), and as the part of a gun that holds rounds of ammunition (p. 120). What are the similarities among these different kinds of clips? How do video clips circulate in this novel? How and where do guns appear in the different narratives? 4. Smells--honeysuckle, vanilla, smoke--are represented visually with swirling typography. Why and how do smells matter in this narrative? How do they compare with other sensory perceptions? What are the hourglass-like symbols (p. 147) that often accompany scents? 5. Police officers address Bobby and Cas as Sam and Hailey (p. 62)--the "allways sixteen" road (and time-)tripping lovers from Mark Z. Danielewski''s novel Only Revolutions . In what ways are Bobby and Cas like Sam and Hailey? 6. In her nightmares Freya sees "a ladder in the floor" (p. 217). What is this significance of this ladder? What ascents and descents occur in Volume 4 ? 7. Why do you think Xanther continues to find it so difficult to name the cat? 8. One of Xanther''s possible names for her cat is "Sadat" (p. 436), and the former Egyptian president Anwar Sadat makes an appearance in a Preview at the beginning of the volume. What does knowledge of President Sadat''s biography add to the story of The Familiar ? How are historical traumas--the Arab-Israeli conflict or the Armenian genocide--woven into the fictional world(s)? 9. More connections between the nine primary characters are established in this volume, such as Luther crossing paths with
In this fourth volume in National Book Award finalist Danielewski's cult-hit magnum opus, The Familiar, a video gone viral puts 12-year-old protagonist Xanther off school, but surprises await when she stays home with her still-unnamed cat.
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