Gates of Eden - Paperback

by Ethan Coen (Author)

"A distinctive voice and an offbeat worldview...All of these stories take place in Coen Brothers Land, a parallel universe similar to our own--except it's weirder, funnier, and better edited." -- New York Times Book Review

The fiction debut of one of the most distinctive filmmakers working today, Ethan Coen.

In Gates of Eden, Ethan Coen exhibits on the printed page the striking, twisted, yet devastatingly on-target vision of modern American life familiar from his movies. The world within the world we live in comes alive in fourteen brazenly original tragicomic short stories--from the Midwest mob war that fizzles due to the principals' ineptness to the trials of a deaf private eye with a blind client to a fugitive's heartbreaking explanation for having beheaded his wife, alarming in that it almost makes sense.

Front Jacket

A middle-aged man beheads his wife, then calmly explains how she drove him to it . . . A fat little mafioso is going to war--in the clean, well-mannered streets of Minneapolis . . . A Jewish boy watches with wonder the rise and fall of a Hebrew school rebel--and sees the sadness at the heart of his own family. . . . Welcome to the world of Ethan Coen, one half of the filmmaking team that has unleashed a visionary, brutal, and uproarious portrait of America in such screen classics as "Fargo and "Raising Arizona. Now Ethan Coen translates that vision to the printed page--in fourteen keenly imagined, sharply etched short stories. Blending parody with pathos, making the heinous heartbreaking, Coen demonstrates his unique gift for stunningly inventive narrative, brutal irony, offbeat characters, and crackling dialogue, delivering everything you would expect from such an original imagination.

Back Jacket

In Gates of Eden, Ethan Coen exhibits on the printed page the striking, twisted, yet devastatingly on-target vision of modern American life familiar from his movies. The world within the world we live in comes alive in fourteen brazenly original tragicomic short stories--from the Midwest mob war that fizzles due to the principals' ineptness to the trials of a deaf private eye with a blind client to a fugitive's heartbreaking explanation for having beheaded his wife, alarming in that it almost makes sense.