Surface Driven: Novel

by Thomas Hamburg

Book Overview

Surface Driven is a nonlinear exploration and celebration of art and artists.? Each chapter presents a host of characters obsessed with their unique visual imperative.? There is no beginning or end to... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1414026315
• ISBN13: 9781414026312
• Release Date: December 2003
• Publisher: 1st Book Library
• Length: 364 Pages
• Weight: 1.16 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.2" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Art and the City

Surface Driven is about lives lived superficially, artistically, sexually. Clever, funny and wry--I loved the character's names and artistic "bents". Inventive, new fiction. Thank you T. Hamburg!

A must-read for music and art enthusiasts!

The characters and scenes from "Surface Driven" come leaping off the pages in a constant flurry of Pynchonesque, heady, stimulating and often times shocking descriptions that will keep you craving more of Hamburg's literary drug. I made the mistake of devouring this book in a quaint public library - my peals of laughter and belly-aching guffaws helped the librarian show me the door before I wanted to leave the comfort of my chair. Any avid reader will venerate the myriad pop culture references from Bowie to Zombie and immediately recognize the influences of Joyce, Wells, Pynchon and others. Plainly, you must read this book - Hamburg's vivid use of language has created characters, scenes and quips that will most assuredly enter the new vernacular!

Brainstream fiction for those who aspire

Surface Driven is a nonlinear exploration and celebration of art and artists. Each chapter, which can be read in any order, presents a host of characters obsessed with their unique visual imperative. There is no beginning or end to the book. Instead one is led around a Möbius strip, presenting the reader with one side (the artist's) and one edge (their art). The novel can be read quickly, as one might race through a gallery. However, embedded within the text are hundreds of pop culture references and purpose-built asides that light up a dazzling atmosphere of paint, sculpture, music, and technology. Underneath it all breathes the theatre of a day in the life of an artist. All the visual art in the book is cerebrally imagined, i.e., none of it exists (a poetic conceit not without intention). Surface Driven is at once hilarious, deviant, provocative, intoxicating, powerful, memorable, cynical, bent, baltic. More brainstream than mainstream Surface Driven will appeal to fans of Geek Love, Hopscotch, V., Steps, Keats, Wordsworth, Shelley, Childhood's End, The Tartar Steppe, The Oxford English Dictionary, The Beatles, Grayson Perry, or anxious thoughts of breaking out of a present tense dead end unfulfilling middle or no management nightmare job. Are you surface driven? Come take a ride.

Hilarious, deviant, cynical, bent ...

Surface Driven is a nonlinear exploration and celebration of art and artists. Each chapter presents a host of characters obsessed with their unique visual imperative. There is no beginning or end to the book. Instead one is led around a Möbius strip, presenting the reader with one side (the artist's) and one edge (their art). The novel can be read quickly, as one might race through a gallery. However, embedded within the text are hundreds of pop culture references and purpose-built asides that light up the dazzling atmosphere of paint, sculpture, music, and technology. Underneath it all breathes the theatre of a day in the life of an artist. All the visual art in the book is cerebrally imagined, i.e., none of it exists (a poetic conceit not without intention). Surface Driven is at once hilarious, deviant, provocative, intoxicating, powerful, memorable, cynical, bent, baltic. More brainstream than mainstream Surface Driven will appeal to fans of Geek Love, Hopscotch, V., Steps, Stone Junction, Humbolt's Gift, Childhood's End, The Tartar Steppe, The Doors, Grayson Perry, or anxious thoughts of breaking out of a present tense dead end unfulfilling middle or no management nightmare job. Are you surface driven? Come take a ride.