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Daisy Buchanan’s Daughter
Publication date: June 22, 2011 "Who could have predicted the daughter of Tom and Daisy Buchanan would find herself, at the age of 86, a crotchety, irreverent, foul-mouthed blogger living in Washington, DC, nursing an obsession for Kirstin Dunst? Or that her life would intersect, scandalously, with Lyndon Baines Johnson? Or that Nick Carraway would find religion? By the time you finish reading this trippy, hilarious, brilliant meta-memoir of a novel, you may need a refresher in 20th Century history to parse fact from fiction." “There beyond the groves of West Egg, in a secret corner of Gatsby’s mansion, is an unmarked door onto the loony American century of this dazzling novel. Once again Tom Carson commits an extravagant act of imagination -- magnificently written, and as seditious and blindingly smart as it is irresistible and laugh-out-loud fun.” She was born during the Jazz Age and grew up in Paris and the American Midwest after her father's death on the polo field and her mother’s later suicide. As a young war reporter, she waded ashore on Omaha Beach and witnessed the liberation of Dachau. She spent the 1950s hobnobbing in Hollywood with Marlene Dietrich and Gene Kelly. She went to West Africa as an ambassador’s wife as Jack Kennedy's Camelot dawned. She comforted a distraught Lyndon Baines Johnson in Washington, DC, as the Vietnam war turned into a quagmire. And today? Today, it’s June 6, 2006: Pamela Buchanan Murphy Gerson Cadwaller’s 86th birthday. With some asperity, she’s waiting for a congratulatory phone call from the president of the United States. Brother, is he ever going to get a piece of her mind. Here's more of what people are saying: “Take a skippy, dizzy, dazzling joyride with a chick who cracks the East and West Eggs wide open. The old lady holding the gun and the keyboard may be Daisy Buchanan’s daughter, but she’s the stylish stepchild of Nabokov, blogging about what happened after Fitzgerald set down his pen. Her own wild adventures—literary, sexual, historical—anticipate a fateful phone call from one of the great villains of recent years. Pammie is the dame-iest of dames, and this is the rompiest of reads. Huzzah!” "In this inventive and masterful novel, Tom Carson takes us inside the privileged post-Gatsby world of the iconic Buchanans, bringing to bear his exquisite and confident imagination as he presents the world of Daisy Buchanan's daughter--a world no less fraught and socially dangerous than the one in which Fitzgerald’s characters roamed. Carson's skill with multiple voices brilliantly illuminates the kaleidoscopic sense of identity one invariably finds in a brittle milieu. The reader will be captivated." "Tom Carson’s new novel is simultaneously an epic sequel to The Great Gatsby, a tour-de-force meta-narrative of the last 90 years of American history, and a dazzling feat of old-fashioned storytelling. The octogenarian narrator of Daisy Buchanan's Daughter is by turns wistful, sarcastic, bemused, nostalgic, furious, and scathingly funny as she evokes – intimately, pungently, and in gorgeous detail – the best and worst century in human history (so far). She is the first great literary character of the new millennium, and her all-encompassing story is some sort of crazy masterpiece." "Daisy Buchanan’s Daughter is an acute, hilarious and moving vision of the 20th century as refracted through two unique sensibilities: that of its indefatigable narrator, and that of the supremely witty, deeply wise and endlessly playful writer who dreamed her up." "To the generations of Fitzgerald readers who wondered what became of Daisy Buchanan's daughter, Tom Carson has the answer. She grew up not careless, but witty, seductive, alarmingly intelligent and possessed of supernal powers of observation. She lived nine decades that swerved to include everything from prewar depression to war coverage, to Cold War power-jockeying and well beyond, with Broadway, Hollywood, and jet-set stopovers aplenty. She did it all with an eye that took in everything from the way her contemporaries were wearing their suits to what lies they told the public and each other. And she recorded it all in a playful, imaginative and extremely funny narrative--and posted it online. Great dames of the 20th century, open your ranks: Pam Buchanan is part of the sisterhood." "Sprawling, clever, flamboyant, recklessly ambitious, Daisy Buchanan’s Daughter takes gigantic risks and delivers gigantic rewards. There aren’t many people writing novels like Tom Carson, but one may be all we need." "As brilliant as fireworks exploding over the Washington Monument, Daisy Buchanan’s Daughter is that rarest of triumphs – a laugh-out-loud
funny novel that’s also dead serious. Conjuring an American landscape
in which fictional characters seem as real as flesh-and-blood people,
Tom Carson’s unforgettable heroine escapes from The Great Gatsby to take us on a tour-de-force guided tour of the past century, from
flipped-out flappers to Dubya’s dream of the orgastic future. Here is
history seen through the looking glass – delirious, diabolically witty,
and absolutely unique." ------------------------------------ Praise for Tom Carson’s previous novel, Gilligan’s Wake: • “There can’t be many books with energy, depth and sheer verbal agility enough to set James Joyce spinning in his grave, but here is one. ‘Genius’ is not a word to sling around carelessly, but Tom Carson must have had one sitting near him when he wrote Gilligan's Wake." • “Wildly original and thoroughly enjoyable.” • “What other book could court comparison with Gravity’s Rainbow and Finnegans Wake and still survive? And how, by the way, does it survive? By force of imaginative invention, verbal excitement, and delirious wit. Gilligan's Wake, offering a brilliant, tragic reading of twentieth-century American history, is as ambitious and provocative a novel as I've read in a long, long time.” • “A loopy, exuberant novel-type prose event.” • “[A] mad-real mind reel of a novel ... intoxicating, ecstatically inventive." • A New York Times Notable Book of the Year, 2003
About the author Village Voice and LA Weekly alum Tom Carson was a two-time National Magazine Award winner during his stint as Esquire’s “Screen” columnist. Currently GQ magazine’s “The Critic,” he lives in New Orleans with his wife and too many cats.
Tom Carson by Victoria F. Gaitán (www.victoriafgaitan.com) Daisy Buchanan's Daughter Contact: Richard Peabody, 703-525-9296 phone/fax, hedgehog2@erols.com
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