Pym

By Johnson, Mat

Publishers Summary:
A comic journey into the ultimate land of whiteness by an unlikely band of African American adventurers Recently canned professor of American literature Chris Jaynes is obsessed with The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, Edgar Allan Poe’s strange and only novel. When he discovers the manuscript of a crude slave narrative that seems to confirm the reality of Poe’s fiction, he resolves to seek out Tsalal, the remote island of pure and utter blackness that Poe describes with horror. Jaynes imagines it to be the last untouched bastion of the African Diaspora and the key to his personal salvation. He convenes an all-black crew of six to follow Pym’s trail to the South Pole in search of adventure, natural resources to exploit, and, for Jaynes at least, the mythical world of the novel. With little but the firsthand account from which Poe derived his seafaring tale, a bag of bones, and a stash of Little Debbie snack cakes, Jaynes embarks on an epic journey under the permafrost of Antarctica, beneath the surface of American history, and behind one of literature’s great mysteries. He finds that here, there be monsters.

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ISBN
978-0-81298-158-2
Publisher
Spiegel & Grau


REVIEWS

Library Journal

Reviewed on January 1, 2011

Johnson, the author of fiction, nonfiction, and graphic novels, playfully explores race in America in his latest genre-jumping work. In the early chapters, filled with hilarious asides and footnotes, professor Chris Jaynes, a mixed-race African studies professor, is denied tenure at a prominent college after chafing at his role as token. Following a bender with an old childhood friend, now an unemployed bus driver, Jaynes...Log In or Sign Up to Read More

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