The MadeUp Man, Joseph Scapellato
The MadeUp Man, Joseph Scapellato
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The Made-Up Man

Author: Joseph Scapellato

Narrator: Ramiz Monsef

Unabridged: 6 hr 52 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 02/05/2019

Synopsis

Existential noir meets absurd comedy when a young man reluctantly enlists as source material for an art project.Stanley had known it was a mistake to accept his uncle Lech’s offer to apartment-sit in Prague―he’d known it was one of Lech’s proposals, a thinly veiled setup for some invasive, potentially dangerous performance art project. But whatever Lech had planned for Stanley, it would get him to Prague and maybe offer a chance to make things right with T after his failed attempt to propose.Stanley can take it. He can ignore their high jinks, resist being drafted into their evolving, darkening script. As the operation unfolds, it becomes clear there’s more to this performance than he expected; they know more about Stanley’s state of mind than he knows himself. He may be able to step over chalk outlines in the hallway, may be able to turn away from the women acting as his mother or the men performing as his father, but when a man made up to look like Stanley begins to play out his most devastating memory, he won’t be able to stand outside this imitation of his life any longer.Immediately and wholly immersive, Joseph Scapellato’s debut novel, The Made-Up Man, is a hilarious examination of art’s role in self-knowledge, a sinister send-up of self-deception, and a big-hearted investigation into the cast of characters necessary to help us finally meet ourselves.

About Joseph Scapellato

Joseph Scapellato published his debut story collection, Big Lonesome, in 2017. He earned his MFA in fiction at New Mexico State University and has been published in Kenyon Review Online, Gulf Coast, Post Road, PANK, UNSAID, and other literary magazines. His work has been anthologized in Forty Stories, Gigantic Worlds, and The &NOW AWARDS: The Best Innovative Writing. Scapellato is an assistant professor of English in the creative writing program at Bucknell University. He grew up in the suburbs of Chicago and lives in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, with his wife, daughter, and dog.

About Ramiz Monsef

Ramiz Monsef has spent several seasons as a member of Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s acting company, and he is the playwright of OSF’s 2013 production The Unfortunates. He has also appeared onstage in New York and in numerous regional productions.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Michael

My full review is now up at Fiction Writers Review: [URL not allowed] This is a very thought-provoking and interesting novel!......more

Goodreads review by Meike

In many ways, Scapellato's debut novel isn't unlike "The Third Hotel", but while Van den Berg meditates about impulse, intuition and the subconscious, this author walks the line between art and the artifical. Our narrator is a 29-year-old Polish-American named Stanley who just dropped out of grad sc......more

Goodreads review by Joe

This book was of particular niche interest to me since my PhD studies focused on aesthetic theory and the blurring of art media and life media enacted by such groups as the Fluxus artists, the happenings artists, and the Vienna Actionists. As somebody very interested in how disrupting traditional ta......more

Goodreads review by Bradley

Such an amazing and surprising thought experiment. I love the author’s use of stream of consciousness and chaotic writing style to demonstrate the actual chaos Stanley experiences. At its core this is a novel about what happens when the line between art and life becomes blurred. Both creepy and phil......more

Goodreads review by Kathleen

My review for the Chicago Tribune: [URL not allowed] In “The Simple Art of Murder,” his 1950 essay on the genre of hard-boiled detective fiction, Raymond Chandler writes that the figure of the detective “must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be......more

Quotes

“Scapellato’s inventive, hallucinatory prose dazzles…A timely dose of his absurdism could prove an antivenom to our problematic times.” New York Times Book Review

“Scapellato’s blend of existential noir, absurdist humor, literary fiction, and surreal exploration of performance art merges into something special…The Made-Up Man is a rare novel that is simultaneously smart and entertaining.” NPR

“Scapellato defies genre expectation…The trajectory of redemption suggests Flannery O’Connor at her best.” Brooklyn Rail

“Wholly original…The deviously warped literary noir The Made-Up Man is an unpredictable and thought-provoking tale of deception, love, and identity.” Evening Post (Lancashire, England)

“Narrator Ramiz Monsef will have listeners laughing through this absurdist depiction of a man named Stanley, whose life turns into performance art. Monsef’s delivery is light, breezy, and quick…This is a quirky listen, but Monsef never loses us along the way.” AudioFile

“Merging the ludicrous and the melancholic, the odd premise provides many laugh-out-loud moments and some curious insights and enables Stanley to explore and understand why he performs the same role each and every day.” Booklist

“Playful, striking, and wholly original, The Made-Up Man is an engrossing mystery of the self, the rare kind of novel that challenges the way we see the world.” Laura Van Den Berg, author of The Third Hotel

“A mystery, a playful essay on performance art, and a meditation on the instability of selfhood. This is a novel like no other you’ll read this year.” Kerry Howley, author of Thrown

Awards

  • Chicago Review of Books Pick
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