The Animators
A Novel
(Sprache: Englisch)
"A wildly original novel that pulses with heart and truth . . . That this powerful exploration of friendship, desire, ambition, and secrets manages to be ebullient, gripping, heartbreaking, and deeply deeply funny is a testament to Kayla Rae Whitaker's...
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"A wildly original novel that pulses with heart and truth . . . That this powerful exploration of friendship, desire, ambition, and secrets manages to be ebullient, gripping, heartbreaking, and deeply deeply funny is a testament to Kayla Rae Whitaker's formidable gifts. I was so sorry to reach the final page. Sharon and Mel will stay with me for a very long time."-Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney, author of The NestONE OF THE BEST DEBUT NOVELS OF THE YEAR-Entertainment Weekly
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR-NPR, Kirkus Reviews, BookPage
She was the first person to see me as I had always wanted to be seen. It was enough to indebt me to her forever.
In the male-dominated field of animation, Mel Vaught and Sharon Kisses are a dynamic duo, the friction of their differences driving them: Sharon, quietly ambitious but self-doubting; Mel, brash and unapologetic, always the life of the party. Best friends and artistic partners since the first week of college, where they bonded over their working-class roots and obvious talent, they spent their twenties ensconced in a gritty Brooklyn studio. Working, drinking, laughing. Drawing: Mel, to understand her tumultuous past, and Sharon, to lose herself altogether.
Now, after a decade of striving, the two are finally celebrating the release of their first full-length feature, which transforms Mel's difficult childhood into a provocative and visually daring work of art. The toast of the indie film scene, they stand at the cusp of making it big. But with their success come doubt and destruction, cracks in their relationship threatening the delicate balance of their partnership. Sharon begins to feel expendable, suspecting that the ever-more raucous Mel is the real artist. During a trip to Sharon's home state of Kentucky, the only other partner she has ever truly known-her troubled, charismatic childhood best friend, Teddy-reenters her life, and long-buried resentments rise to the surface, hastening a reckoning no one sees
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coming.
A funny, heartbreaking novel of friendship, art, and trauma, The Animators is about the secrets we keep and the burdens we shed on the road to adulthood.
"Suffused with humor, tragedy and deep insights about art and friendship."-People
"[A] stunning debut."-Variety
"A compulsively readable portrait of women as incandescent artists and intimate collaborators."-Elle
A funny, heartbreaking novel of friendship, art, and trauma, The Animators is about the secrets we keep and the burdens we shed on the road to adulthood.
"Suffused with humor, tragedy and deep insights about art and friendship."-People
"[A] stunning debut."-Variety
"A compulsively readable portrait of women as incandescent artists and intimate collaborators."-Elle
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Lese-Probe zu „The Animators “
This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected copy proofCopyright © 2017 Kayla Rae Whitaker
PROLOGUE:
INTRODUCTION TO SKETCH
IntroductIon to Sketch was held In Prebble hall, a building Professor McIntosh called "Ballister's dirtiest secret" during our first class. Prebble was an ancient, pipe-clanking fortress on the edge of campus with heating problems, leaky ceilings, and those 1930s wall radiators we used to melt crayons on in grade school. "You pay fifty thousand dollars a year to attend this institution," he said, "and they stick you in a hovel for four years. It's because they hate art."
The tuition comment didn't hold much weight for me. I was on scholarship. My peers talked about skiing in Aspen and summers in the Hamptons. Ballister was their safety school when Stanford and Duke eluded them. They spoke with the opaque, offhand world knowledge of the privileged. My first weekend there, I watched a girl at a party barf into a five-hundred-dollar Coach purse. Terrified of the cafeteria's clamor, I had taken to eating three meals of ramen noodles a day in my dorm room.
I went to Ballister because of the visual arts program, because they'd given me their Poor Appalachian Kid scholarship, and because it was as far away from home as I could manage. I had chosen art because I needed something to make use of the bright lights that had existed in my head for as long as I could remember, my fervent, neon wish to be someone else. In high school, I sampled my way up and down the artistic spectrum methodically, like the good student I was, hoping I'd land on something that sparked me: I sketched, I constructed shadowboxes, I threw some rudimentary pots, trying a little of everything, committing seriously to nothing. Too scared, at that point, to put myself at stake for fear of failure. The revelation, maybe, that I had nothing to give. I had yet to encounter anything that made the risk seem worthwhile. I came to Ballister hoping that being there would
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put an end to my floundering. That I would finally buckle down and find what I was supposed to make, and that it would mean something.
I had taken the Amtrak train twenty-two hours out of Maysville, Kentucky, to the tiny upstate New York town in which Ballister was located. Ballister was, I was surprised to learn, not too terribly removed from Canada. My parents' geographic sense of the north wasn't much better than mine. They didn't believe me at first, when I told them I was five hours from New York City and hence out of harm's reach. Before I left, my father cleared his throat and thumped me on the back like I was another man. My mother gave me a fierce hug, something with a degree of pain to it, and said with her chin hooked over my shoulder, "Don't you come back pregnant."
My parents met working in a factory that made lawnmower parts. The brand's claim to fame: George Jones had once drunkenly straddled its luxury model while pursued by the Texas State Police. They were resigned to their jobs, to each other, and to us, their children, who had all the fish sticks and Nintendo we needed. They watched Wheel of Fortune with three feet of space between them on the couch. They fought often, and loudly. Neither had gone to college; they hoped I would become something useful, like a CPA.
The closest I had come to finding something that lit me up was in a summer gifted-and-talented program, just before my senior year. In an art course there, I made a graphic novella of the night my mom threw an ottoman at my dad, laboring over how the glass patio door shattered, shards tumbling in an arc of beauty into the green holler bottom below. I painted a textured oil backdrop to simulate the night air wadding itself into a tornado: the Horror of '89, which touched down that very night in regions of East Kentucky, West Virginia, and the golden triangle of Kingsport, Johnson City, and Bristol, Tennessee. The instructor, upon seeing it, complimented me but grimaced. Said, "I
I had taken the Amtrak train twenty-two hours out of Maysville, Kentucky, to the tiny upstate New York town in which Ballister was located. Ballister was, I was surprised to learn, not too terribly removed from Canada. My parents' geographic sense of the north wasn't much better than mine. They didn't believe me at first, when I told them I was five hours from New York City and hence out of harm's reach. Before I left, my father cleared his throat and thumped me on the back like I was another man. My mother gave me a fierce hug, something with a degree of pain to it, and said with her chin hooked over my shoulder, "Don't you come back pregnant."
My parents met working in a factory that made lawnmower parts. The brand's claim to fame: George Jones had once drunkenly straddled its luxury model while pursued by the Texas State Police. They were resigned to their jobs, to each other, and to us, their children, who had all the fish sticks and Nintendo we needed. They watched Wheel of Fortune with three feet of space between them on the couch. They fought often, and loudly. Neither had gone to college; they hoped I would become something useful, like a CPA.
The closest I had come to finding something that lit me up was in a summer gifted-and-talented program, just before my senior year. In an art course there, I made a graphic novella of the night my mom threw an ottoman at my dad, laboring over how the glass patio door shattered, shards tumbling in an arc of beauty into the green holler bottom below. I painted a textured oil backdrop to simulate the night air wadding itself into a tornado: the Horror of '89, which touched down that very night in regions of East Kentucky, West Virginia, and the golden triangle of Kingsport, Johnson City, and Bristol, Tennessee. The instructor, upon seeing it, complimented me but grimaced. Said, "I
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Autoren-Porträt von Kayla Rae Whitaker
Kayla Rae Whitaker was born and raised in Kentucky. She is a graduate of the University of Kentucky and of New York University's MFA program, which she attended as a Jack Kent Cooke Graduate Scholar. She lives in Louisville. This is her first novel.
Bibliographische Angaben
- Autor: Kayla Rae Whitaker
- 2017, 384 Seiten, Masse: 16,5 x 24,5 cm, Gebunden, Englisch
- Verlag: Random House
- ISBN-10: 0812989287
- ISBN-13: 9780812989281
- Erscheinungsdatum: 13.01.2017
Sprache:
Englisch
Pressezitat
"A wildly original novel that pulses with heart and truth . . . That this powerful exploration of friendship, desire, ambition, and secrets manages to be ebullient, gripping, heartbreaking, and deeply deeply funny is a testament to Kayla Rae Whitaker's formidable gifts. I was so sorry to reach the final page. Sharon and Mel will stay with me for a very long time."-Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney, author of The Nest"Unusual and appealing . . . The Animators covers familiar debut-novel territory: the search for identity, the desire for success, the bewildering experiences of small-town misfits leaving home for the bright lights of New York City. But Whitaker turns these motifs on their heads simply by changing the direction of the road and populating it with women."-The New York Times Book Review
"A mix of Beaches, Girls, and Thelma & Louise . . . a 'complicated,' 'sensual, sexy,' raw nerve of a 'roller coaster' through a 'tumultuous' friendship . . . If you let this story happen to you, you're gonna love it."-Glamour
"The Animators is inspiring in its freshness and its authenticity, one of the most original and raw books I've read in a long time. I look forward to more Whitaker novels to add to my library."-The Dallas Morning News
"A compulsively readable portrait of women as incandescent artists and intimate collaborators."-Elle
"Smart, funny, and vibrant, beautifully capturing the intricacies of friendship . . . a vital read."-Nylon
"An engrossing, exuberant ride through all the territories of love-familial, romantic, sexual, love of friends, and, perhaps above all, white-hot passion for the art you were born to make . . . I wish I'd written The Animators."-Emma Donoghue, author of Room and The Wonder
"The Animators is a heartbreakingly beautiful, sharply funny, arrestingly unforgettable novel about love and genius, the powerful obsessiveness of artistic creation, and the equally powerful undertow of the past. Kayla Rae Whitaker writes like her
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head is on fire."-Kate Christensen, PEN/Faulkner Award-winning author of The Great Man
"[A] tender, lively début . . . [Kayla Rae] Whitaker's nimbly created characters are as vibrant as the novel's title suggests."-The New Yorker
"Abiding friendships . . . are rarely portrayed with such nuance and humor as in this first novel, a nimble comedic turn edged with shadow."-O: The Oprah Magazine
"Memorable, sure-handed, and absorbing."-The Boston Globe
"Brimming with electricity . . . Whitaker has crafted one of 2017's first page-turners."-Paste
"Well-wrought and evocative . . . [Mel and Sharon's] partnership, which is at once fervent and wonderfully unsentimental, gives The Animators its soul."-The Washington Post
"This novel is the holy grail; it's the rare novel that explores and examines the deep friendship and professional lives of two women [and] keeps that focus."-The Baltimore Sun
"Difficult to forget long after finishing the last few pages . . . [This breakout novel] fills a literary gap, which has been waiting for a tale of millennial female friendship and love without tacky genre borders or stereotypes."-Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
"[An] outstanding debut . . . Whitaker skillfully charts the creative process, its lulls and sudden rushes of perfect inspiration. And in the relationship between Mel and Sharon, she has created something wonderful and exceptional: a rich, deep, and emotionally true connection that will certainly steal the hearts of readers."-Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Unexpected and nuanced and pulsing with life . . . Sweeping and intimate . . . Empathetic but never sentimental; a book that creeps up on you and then swallows you whole."-Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Kayla Rae Whitaker writes breathlessly and beautifully about the power of deep, true friendship and the ways in which people-and friendships-change over the years. . . . Mel and Sharon jump off the page as real, fully formed characters, and spending time
"[A] tender, lively début . . . [Kayla Rae] Whitaker's nimbly created characters are as vibrant as the novel's title suggests."-The New Yorker
"Abiding friendships . . . are rarely portrayed with such nuance and humor as in this first novel, a nimble comedic turn edged with shadow."-O: The Oprah Magazine
"Memorable, sure-handed, and absorbing."-The Boston Globe
"Brimming with electricity . . . Whitaker has crafted one of 2017's first page-turners."-Paste
"Well-wrought and evocative . . . [Mel and Sharon's] partnership, which is at once fervent and wonderfully unsentimental, gives The Animators its soul."-The Washington Post
"This novel is the holy grail; it's the rare novel that explores and examines the deep friendship and professional lives of two women [and] keeps that focus."-The Baltimore Sun
"Difficult to forget long after finishing the last few pages . . . [This breakout novel] fills a literary gap, which has been waiting for a tale of millennial female friendship and love without tacky genre borders or stereotypes."-Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
"[An] outstanding debut . . . Whitaker skillfully charts the creative process, its lulls and sudden rushes of perfect inspiration. And in the relationship between Mel and Sharon, she has created something wonderful and exceptional: a rich, deep, and emotionally true connection that will certainly steal the hearts of readers."-Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Unexpected and nuanced and pulsing with life . . . Sweeping and intimate . . . Empathetic but never sentimental; a book that creeps up on you and then swallows you whole."-Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Kayla Rae Whitaker writes breathlessly and beautifully about the power of deep, true friendship and the ways in which people-and friendships-change over the years. . . . Mel and Sharon jump off the page as real, fully formed characters, and spending time
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