Scott McClanahan

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Scott McClanahan with thug tattoos

Scott McClanahan (born June 24, 1978 ) is an American writer and filmmaker . He is the author of several novels and volumes of short stories and lives in Beckley , West Virginia .

life and work

After the publication of several volumes of short stories, McClanahan published his first novel Crapalachia in 2013 and was praised for its content and writing style. His second novel Hill William followed in the same year . In collaboration with the Spanish artist and illustrator Ricardo Cavolo , he produced a graphic novel in 2016 entitled The Incantations of Daniel Johnston . It is dedicated to the life of the singer-songwriter Daniel Johnston (1961–2019) and leads in a surreal way through the inner world of the eccentric musician, who comes from the same state as McClanahan.

His novel Sarah (original title: The Sarah Book ) was published in February 2020 by the Franconian publisher ars vivendi and is his first work that is available in German. The Austrian translator and award-winning writer Clemens Setz was responsible for the translation . The book is a semi-autobiographical story of separation and is about the marriage of the first-person narrator , who is named like the author Scott , and his ex-wife Sarah. In addition to numerous intimate depictions of alcoholism and depression , it deals with humorous and bizarre passages, such as the life of the main character in the car in a Walmart parking lot or the burning of a Bible that was given to the McClanahans for their wedding a few years earlier.

The book has been discussed in media such as NPR , Rolling Stone and Electric Literature and received largely positive reviews. In German-speaking countries, it was discussed in the Süddeutsche Zeitung , DerStandard.at and Spiegel Online , in the Kurier and in the Kleine Zeitung , among others . It is also listed on Radio Eins and in the Upper Austrian Volksblatt as a book tip. At the end of April 2020, Sarah landed in 8th place on the SWR best list for the month of May and in 3rd place in the books of the month April of the Süddeutsche Zeitung.

With his ex-wife Sarah, McClanahan has two children, Iris Grace and Samuel Ray. He has been married to Juliet Escoria , who works as a writer, for the second time since 2014 . In addition to his literary work, McClanahan and his friend Chris Oxley run the Holler Presents project , which is both a film production company and a music label.

Style and reception

McClanahan's works often focus on his homeland, rural West Virginia and the Appalachians . Living away from the literary metropolises, Tobias Carroll calls him a literary outsider in Rolling Stone and compares him to other southern authors such as Harry Crews and Flannery O'Connor . Because of his unpolished writing style, Dominik Kamalzadeh portrays the author for the Austrian standard as a “lover of the grotesque” and creates a literary relationship with Charles Bukowski . Jason Lucarelli of Numéro Cinq sees a mixture of Ken Kesey , Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Brautigan in the author's work . In his review of Crapalachia for the Washington Post , Steve Donoghue describes McClanahan as "a masterful chronicler of the backwoods, rural America" ​​and makes comparisons with his contemporaries Daniel Woodrell and Tom Franklin .

John McElwee of Oxford American defines McClanahan's writing as "relentlessly honest" and "completely bare." His prose is often characterized as "contagious, dizzying and repetitive", but is also characterized by "unabashed clarity". The often semi-autobiographical material makes it difficult for the reader to differentiate between reality and fiction, the narrative voices are often perceived as simultaneously “omniscient and extremely fallible”, but always “comradely”.

McClanahan's writing style is roughly assigned to auto-fictional narration by many reviewers . Julian Brimmers notes in his review of Sarah , written for Die Zeit , that despite a perceived current industry trend towards autofiction, McClanahan should be highlighted; Specifically through a "surrealistic approach that first takes care of melody and style, then the plot." In addition, the main character lives in an "exaggeration of the subjective" "in constant comparison with the entire human experience."

The use of rural regionality in McClanahan's writing (real locations, people and events in and from West Virginia) is sometimes given a pan-American feel through numerous uses of brand names and pop cultural references. For this particular form of Americana , Mesha Maren uses the term shopping mall surrealism in connection with Sarah and writes: "Scott McClanahan [...] celebrates Mountain Dew , Applebees and Walmart to the fullest; in his hands are these familiar references to beautiful ones Wise distorted and create a transcendent meditation on modern materialism . " She also states: "It is not regional fiction, but human fiction, and it is best not to read it as a zoological window into the exotic Appalachians, but rather as a window to oneself. The ubiquity of the shopping malls makes it easier and stronger this perspective. " Christoph Schröder from SWR2 describes the inclusion of such locations as a literary combination of greed for consumption and sadness.

Ocean Vuong counts Crapalachia among the 10 most important literary inspirations for the creation of his debut novel "On earth we are briefly grandiose" . For Vuong, McClanahan is "one of those rare writers who realize Kafka's credo that a book should be the ax that shatters the icy soul of us."

bibliography

Novels

stories

Graphic novels

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b https://vimeo.com/hollerpresents
  2. ↑ a b Steve Donoghue: 'Crapalachia,' by Scott McClanahan. In: Washington Post. April 23, 2013, accessed April 20, 2020 .
  3. ^ A b Allison Glock: Country Living. In: New York Times. May 31, 2013, accessed April 20, 2020 .
  4. ^ John Seven: The late musician Daniel Johnston and his deep connection with comics. In: Comic Beat. September 16, 2019, accessed April 20, 2020 .
  5. ^ Elmar Krekeler: Clemens Johann Setz receives the Leipzig Book Prize. In: The world. March 17, 2011, accessed April 20, 2020 .
  6. ↑ 2020 Kleist Prize to Clemens J. Setz , nachtkritik.de , published on March 30, 2020, accessed on April 17, 2020
  7. ↑ nn: Wassermann Prize - Fürth honors Clemens J. Setz. In: Fürther Nachrichten of January 24, 2020 (print edition)
  8. ↑ Scott McClanahan: I'm Living in the Walmart Parking Lot Until My Wife Takes Me Back. In: Vice Online . June 6, 2017, accessed April 20, 2020 .
  9. ↑ a b c Dominik Kamalzadeh: Scott McClanahan's "Sarah": A novel like a rock song. In: derStandard.at. April 5, 2020, accessed April 20, 2020 .
  10. ^ A b Nate McNamara: Separating Fact From Fiction In Scott McClanahan's Hillbilly Elegies. In: The Village Voice . June 27, 2017, accessed April 20, 2020 .
  11. ↑ Michael Schaub: 'The Sarah Book' Is An Unsparing Primal Scream Of A Book. In: National Public Radio. July 31, 2017, accessed April 20, 2020 .
  12. ^ A b c d Tobias Carroll: Scott McClanahan, Appalachian Literary Outsider, on His Harrowing Divorce Book. In: Rolling Stone. July 2, 2017, accessed April 20, 2020 .
  13. ↑ Michael J. Seidlinger: Double Take: Scott McClanahan's 'The Sarah Book' is Beautifully Told and Breathtaking. In: Electric Literature. June 21, 2017, accessed April 20, 2020 .
  14. ↑ Insa Wilke: Dialogue with Pug. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung. March 1, 2017, accessed April 20, 2020 .
  15. ↑ Bernd Noack: Such a life is pointless, with or without a pug. In: Spiegel Online. April 24, 2020, accessed April 29, 2020 .
  16. ↑ Peter Pisa: A novel from the end of a marriage with crossword puzzles. In: Courier. March 20, 2020, accessed April 20, 2020 .
  17. ↑ Werner Krause: The gallows humor offers last help. In: Small newspaper. March 14, 2017, accessed April 20, 2020 .
  18. ↑ Favorite book: Sarah. In: Radio Eins. March 26, 2020, accessed April 20, 2020 .
  19. ^ Scott McClanahan: Sarah. In: Upper Austrian Volksblatt. March 14, 2020, accessed April 20, 2020 .
  20. ^ Scott McClanahan: Sarah. In: SWR2. April 23, 2020, accessed April 29, 2020 .
  21. ↑ Betty goes into quarantine. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung. April 30, 2020, accessed May 5, 2020 .
  22. ↑ http://www.curbsidebooksrecords.com/events/2017/10/5/scott-mcclanahan-comes-to-curbside
  23. ↑ Juliet Escoria: True Life: I Married Scott McClanahan. In: Hobart (magazine). September 6, 2014, accessed April 20, 2020 .
  24. ↑ Eric Nelson: Scott McClanahan's The Sarah Book. In: The Brooklyn Rail . October 2017, accessed April 20, 2020 .
  25. ↑ Jason Lucarelli: Consciously Amateurish. In: Numéro Cinq. June 2017, accessed on April 20, 2020 .
  26. ↑ John McElwee: An Interview With Scott McClanahan. In: Oxford American. October 30, 2013, accessed April 20, 2020 .
  27. ↑ April Ayers Lawson: Scott McClanahan: "Most Fiction Feels Like a Bunch of Dumb Stories". In: Oxford American . August 17, 2017, accessed April 20, 2020 .
  28. ^ Michael Friedrich: Spirit of the Strip Mall. In: The New Republic. May 24, 2018, accessed June 12, 2020 .
  29. ↑ Guia Cortassa: The Sarah Book by Scott McClanahan. In: American Microreviews & Interviews. 2018, accessed on June 12, 2020 .
  30. ↑ Julian Brimmers: Chaos with method. In: The time . June 9, 2020, accessed June 12, 2020 .
  31. ↑ a b Mesha Maren: The King of Shopping Mall Surrealism. In: The Millions. June 20, 2017, accessed May 5, 2020 .
  32. ↑ Christoph Schröder: Book of the week: Scott McClanahan - Sarah. In: SWR2 Worth reading magazine. May 24, 2020, accessed May 27, 2020 .
  33. ^ Ocean Vuong: Ocean Vuong: The 10 Books I Needed to Write My Novel. In: Literary Hub. October 1, 2019, accessed on May 5, 2020 .
personal data
SURNAME McClanahan, Scott
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer and filmmaker
DATE OF BIRTH June 24, 1978