[thingist] Wu Ming Presents Manituana (This Fri @ BlueStockings)

[Snafu]

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.