Description: Praise for Tragedy of Arthur "Splendidly devious." NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, COVER REVIEW "[Phillips] best trick is to balance a moving story of familial and romantic love on a deliberately unsteady fictional edifice[an] exuberant chimera of a novel. Boldly he includes the full five-act play itself, a virtuosic counterfeit." --THE NEW YORKER "Sparkling and imaginative. Shakespeare would applaud a man who does him so proud. Readers, too, may well praise Phillips for crafting so wily and witty an excursion into the ties that bind fiction and life." BOSTON GLOBE "His wildest and funniest yet, at once homage to Nabokov''s Pale Fire, satire of literary hagiography in general and Shakespeare scholarship in particular, and a hilarious yet trenchant riff on memoirs." NPR.org "Devious and exhilarating such a wonderful con job." Wall Street Journal "Wily and wonderfula shape-shifting stunner diabolically merry." -CLEVELAND PLAIN DEALER "A literary treasureshows off a writer at the top of his game." --THE WASHINGTON POST BOOK REVIEW "[Phillips] writes beautifully. His prose crackles with wit, and tough but shrewd observations Certainly, it contains literary echoes of Nabokov, Stoppard and even the Thomas Pynchon of The Crying of Lot 49 I don''t think these comparisons are unmerited. This is the real deal: You just can''t fake this stuff. Ultimately, this a book about authenticity, not only of literary texts but also of people and filial relationshipsSerious and emotionally rich material, and Phillips handles it skillfully and sympathetically." SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, COVER REVIEW "Phillips invests the metafictional gamesmanship with bracing intelligence and genuine heart. .. the energy never flags as the book develops into both a literary mystery and a surprisingly effective critique of the Bard." -ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY "The novel is, indeed, a tragedy of authorship, but it is also the story of a man whose self-inflicted, tragicomic woes are as affecting and wincingly believable as those endured by the hero of any conventional fiction. That Arthur''s spectacular crash-and-burn comes nestled in a web of ingenious and very funny literary allusions only makes it that much more of a treat.." -SALON "Witty, touching and intricate" -THE ST. PAUL PIONEER PRESS "As a concept, The Tragedy of Arthur is ingenious. As a novel, it is affecting. A concoction of such amusing erudition, obvious Bard worship and hilarious footnotes you sort of wish it were real. What is real is Phillips'' ongoing work as one of our most original writers" -NEWSDAY "Like his spiritual brother, David Mitchell, Phillips not only kicks postmodernism awake but encourages it to shoot crystal meth." -VILLAGE VOICE "A long-lost Shakespeare play surfaces in Phillips's wily fifth novel, a sublime faux memoir framed as the introduction to the play's first printing-a Modern Library edition, of courseThe play itself, which reads not unlike something written by the man from Stratford-upon-Avon. It''s a tricky project, funny and brazen, smart and playful." « -PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, STARRED REVIEW « "What a great idea. For his fifth novel, The Tragedy of Arthur, Arthur Phillips has created - or discovered, to go along with the conceit of his fiction - a lost Shakespeare play, "The Most Excellent and Tragical Historie of Arthur, King of Britain," purportedly written in 1597. Or has he? That''s part of the point of this audacious novel, to blur the lines between reality and imagination, to use the play as a starting point for a meditation on the nature of family, identity, deception and literary heritageHow fun to watch a writer be so discursive and irreverent, producing a story within a story that cannot help but comment on itself." -L.A. TIMES, faces to watch in 2011 "A memoir and a Shakespearean play wrapped into a novel? Who could pull this off but the prolific Phillips'....Highly recommended for all who enjoy inspired, original, entertaining writing- deftly delivered here by one of our most talented arthurs, uh, authors." -LIBRARY JOURNAL, STARRED REVIEW Praise for Arthur Phillips "Ingenious . . . [Phillips] presents [his characters] with a wry generosity and a haunting poignancy to rival his wonderfully subversive wit."- The New York Times, on Prague "A wonder, a work of imaginative prowess . . . It's ambitious. It's inventive. It's challenging. . . . Phillips's approach is certainly literary, but he also knows how to craft a twisting, page-turning tale."- San Francisco Chronicle, on The Egyptologist "[A] masterpiece . . . seamlessly mixes psychological disintegration, the dissolution of a marriage and . . . a classic ghost story."- USA Today, on Angelica "Daring . . . [an] incandescent new novel . . . richly human, filled with unexpected grace . . . A burning urgency animates the tale."- The Washington Post, on The Song Is You "It''s a tricky project, funny and brazen, smart and playful." - Publisher''s Weekly, starred review From the Hardcover edition.

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