This Is Your Captain Speaking
Thursday, September 22, 2011 at 02:15PM Download the press release for THIS IS YOUR CAPTAIN SPEAKING:
Advance praise:
“The cheeky send-up is aggressively experimental, but Methven manages to tell an engaging story amid the antic high jinks. B+”
- Entertainment Weekly (Review here)
“A Pynchonesque, offbeat parody of American media coverage and celebrity. . . . a smart, fast-paced farce in which Methven ably satirizes America’s signature take on reality and culture of greed.”
- Booklist
“[A] buoyant debut . . . Fans of McSweeney’s Internet Tendency will relish this frequent contributor’s snappy farce about publicity, celebrity culture, and a ne’er-do-well’s attempt to save some crippled orphans by way of one Beatle’s frozen swimmers.”
- Publishers Weekly
“What if the ‘Miracle on the Hudson’ were completely faked by an unscrupulous airline company in order to boost prices? And what if we got a guy to write the whole thing up just like Carl Hiaasen? . . . Don’t miss Methven’s psychotic, if interactive, reading group guide at the end.”
- Kirkus Reviews
“Every so often a first novel comes along that blows your hair back with its ingenuity, that jumpstarts your faith in imaginative literature, and Jon Methven has written one of those novels. This is an astonishing debut, a comedic masterwork worthy of the great Joe Orton and Stanley Elkin. Outrageous and gorgeously absurd, it shows us, with fearless accuracy, what a twisted tribe we have become.”
- William Giraldi, author of Busy Monsters
"I’m not sure how it happened, but Thomas Pynchon and Donald Barthelme bumped into one another while toting their samples into a sperm bank. Jon Methven is the result. This Is Your Captain Speaking proves that Methven has his finger on the pulse of the absurd, the topical, the real. Here’s a novel that soars and soars. And swaggers relentlessly.
- George Singleton, author of Stray Decorum
"A playful and witty send-up of our media-mad culture. Methven is a comic writer to watch, and This is Your Captain Speaking is a promising debut."
- Jonathan Evison, author of West of Here
