Date: Friday, November 20, 2009 7:00pm
Location: BlueStockings 172 Allen St New York, NY
Wu Ming is a pseudonym for a group of Italian authors, “a band of guerrilla novelists” whom have collaboratively written several novels, including 54 (2002), Manituana (2009), and, under the pseudonym of Luther Blissett, Q (1999).
The novel “Manituana,” recently published by Verso in the UK and the United States, is the newest of Wu Ming’s collectively authored books. It was written between 2003-2007, and is the first of an 18th-century pan-Atlantic trilogy set during the firmament of the American Revolution.
The book is set during the Revolutionary War. This novel blends fact and fiction in a story that centers on a New World family of mixed British and Native American descent. The Johnson-Brant clan lives in a world that is familiar but not immediately of its time: hunter-gathering and Indian cosmology are part of a way of life that also includes violin-playing and living in stone houses rather than teepees. With fleeting glimpses of historical figures, set-piece battle narratives, and epic wilderness scenes, Manituana weaves the chaos of the civil war and the founding of a new nation into a story on the heroic scale of James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, and with a cult appeal similar to Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves.