Which is about the happiest headline I could type. Of all the authors who could most make my day by revealing that they're working away at their next book (Shirley Hazzard? Alan Hollinghurst? Charles Burns (yes!)? Nathanael West faked the car crash and has been writing all along?) I'm not sure the shortlist could get short enough that it wouldn't include Dan Clowes. And it's especially good to hear since I've been worried that since Ghost World Clowes has been drawn for good into the screenwriting world (although the two upcoming projects listed under his name at imdb do sound crazy-delicious: an adaptation of Rudy Rucker's Master of Space and Time, rumored to be directed by Michel Gondry and star Jack Black and Dave Chappelle (!!!) and the story of the real Mississippi kids who did a shot-for-shot backyard remake of Raiders in the '80s).
The Book Bench at The New Yorker (whose latest cover is a Clowes) has a handful of panels, including the one to the right, and a few details:
“I don’t even have a title for it yet,” he told me, but hinted that the
plot concerned “a guy whose father dies, and he’s completely alone, so
he tries to reconstruct what he’s lost, to approximate a nuclear family
by joining people together.” Each page of the book is an individual
scene, a joke on the format of a Sunday cartoon strip, but cumulatively
the scenes create a larger narrative that turns from comic to tragic.
--Tom
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