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American Whiskey Bar

American Whiskey Bar
Your Price: $19.95 CDN
Author: Michael Turner
Foreword by: William Gibson
Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press
Format: Softcover
# of Pages: 182
Pub. Date: 2004
ISBN-10: 1551521598
ISBN-13: 9781551521596

About the Book:

American Whiskey Bar was named one of the best books of the year in Canada by The Globe & Mail, Toronto Star, and Quill & Quire.

American Whiskey Bar is a remarkable faux memoir about the un-making of a notorious underground film – a film which Michael Turner was commissioned to write. However, whether or not this film was ever made is debatable. And only one print is said to exist. Nevertheless, American Whiskey Bar, a film seen by only a handful of people, is well on its way to becoming a curious footnote to cinematic history.

American Whiskey Bar, the book, is an attempt by Michael Turner to set the record straight. His resulting screenplay, American Whiskey Bar takes place entirely in a cocktail bar, focusing on the intensely personal conversations of those gathered them. American Whiskey Bar the book is in fact several books in one: the wistful memoirs of an artist co-opted by greed; a biting satire of the movie industry; and the complete screenplay American Whiskey Bar – a story of sex, violence, lies, ambition, racism, dreams, and regret. It was produced as a live film experiment directed by acclaimed filmmaker Bruce Macdonald and aired in 1998 on Toronto's CityTV during the final weekend of the Toronto Film Festival.

When first published in 1997, American Whiskey Bar elicited rave reviews for its anti-aesthetic, postmodern ideas of what constitutes a novel. This new edition of the book features a new cover and a new foreword by William Gibson.

What people say:

"Tightly packed… the book weaves its way in and out of various levels of reality…. There's a bright, playful mind at work here. — Toronto Star

"Turner constructs an intense, intelligent, and darkly humorous satire… Too original to be nominated for awards." — Quill & Quire

"Turner is probably the most original writer BC has produced in a generation." — Gerogia Straight

"Brilliant… a dazzling, dizzying multilayered blend of fact and fiction, of the plausible and the preposterous, of the real and the hyper-real. It is also screamingly funny. A daring reconfiguration of the fictional narrative." — Vancouver Magazine

"…conflicts of class, race, gender, and sexuality erupt in hilariously schematic and surreal ways. Professing to be less than it is, it's a surprisingly haunting work – a smutty Pale Fire that, through its dizzying strata of competing truths, may have more to say about our reality than it ever lets on." — Village Voice

About the Author:

Michael Turner lives in Vancouver, where, in addition to novels and screenplays, he writes art essays. He has won a BC Book Prize for fiction and a Genie Award for Original Song.