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A Man Jumps Out of an Airplane

Stories

By Barry Yourgrau
Published by Arcade
Distributed by Simon & Schuster

Ever dreamed of strolling through a Dali print? Or stepping into a fairy tale? Open A Man Jumps Out of an Airplane and experience the rush of having reality yanked from underfoot.

This is the book that put Barry Yourgrau on the literary map, where he remains as an icon of imaginative prowess. In A Man Jumps Out of an Airplane, Yourgrau focuses his wide-awake subconscious mind on well-trodden themes—fathers, mothers, lovers, sex, the imagination itself—and recasts them into madcap parables, surrealistic fables, and grotesque fantasies. Here are dreamscapes compressed into razor-sharp prose, where a twelve-inch girl lolls in her date’s spaghetti, where a warrior steps out of the Iliad as an intruder in a backyard swimming pool, where a man climbs inside a cow on a bet. Hilarious, subversive, and uniquely entertaining, Yourgrau treats readers to a circus of surreal, impish beauty, poignant flashes of tragedy, and a headstand of everyday reality.

“A real comic gift. An identifiable world vision composed of considerable sadness, hilarity, compassion, terror, and sexual longing.” —New York Times Book Review

“Yourgrau writes like a modern-day Morpheus with a rapier wit.” —Entertainment Weekly

“Yourgrau deserves to be read and reread, preferably at bedtime. This man’s imagination evokes the Victorian hallucinations of Lewis Carroll. Hilarious, frightening, sometimes bawdy.” —Boston Pheonix

“I can never remember my dreams, so Mr. Yourgrau’s stories are a pretty good substitute.” —David Byrne

“Reading Barry Yougrau is addictive, like putting peanuts in your nose and they turn into spaceships or something.” —Roy Blount Jr.

“Barry Yourgrau manages to articulate your most bugged out daydreams.” —Adam Horovitz of the Beastie Boys

“A real comic gift. An identifiable world vision composed of considerable sadness, hilarity, compassion, terror, and sexual longing.” —New York Times Book Review

“Yourgrau writes like a modern-day Morpheus with a rapier wit.” —Entertainment Weekly

“Yourgrau deserves to be read and reread, preferably at bedtime. This man’s imagination evokes the Victorian hallucinations of Lewis Carroll. Hilarious, frightening, sometimes bawdy.” —Boston Pheonix

“I can never remember my dreams, so Mr. Yourgrau’s stories are a pretty good substitute.” —David Byrne

“Reading Barry Yougrau is addictive, like putting peanuts in your nose and they turn into spaceships or something.” —Roy Blount Jr.

“Barry Yourgrau manages to articulate your most bugged out daydreams.” —Adam Horovitz of the Beastie Boys

A Man Jumps Out of an Airplane

Stories

By Barry Yourgrau
Published by Arcade
Distributed by Simon & Schuster

More books from this author: Barry Yourgrau