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Vincent
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Torture the Artist

Published by Diogenes as Vincent
Original Title: Torture the Artist

An old, sick man close to death: Foster Lipowitz, founder of a media empire, has flooded the market with meaningless pop songs, bad movies and cynical TV series, and has earned a fortune. He regrets what he has inflicted on culture, and at the end of his life he wants to make amends.
A plan: In Midwestern corn fields he builds a school, where highly talented children are educated to become true artists. And because he knows that true art originates in suffering, he makes sure that his pupils get enough of that.
A dark guardian angel: every pupil is assigned a ›protector‹, there to do the dirty work. One of them is Harlan, a disillusioned ex-musician. He takes his job very seriously.
A victim: Vincent Spinetti, the most gifted student of all. Thanks to Harlan's efforts to litter Vincent's life with catastrophes, his genius comes to full fruition. The more pain and sorrow he experiences, the greater Vincent's art gets.
An unlikely friendship: hard to believe, but Vincent and Harlan become friends. But Vincent doesn't know what Harlan's job really is …
An author with a unique voice who easily bridges the gap between levity and seriousness, between satire and poetry.


General Fiction
448 pages
2005

978-3-257-06485-8
Factsheet PDF Contact us
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»If you could bottle Joey Goebel's imagination and sell it by the glass, we'd all be in rehab. Torture the Artist – which addresses the premise that art, like grapes in a wine press, can be squeezed out of an artist by various torments – is as full of surprises as a brand new vintage, and Joey Goebel is the wunderkind of contemporary American fiction.«

Ed McClanahan / American novelist
»As long as new writers like Joey Goebel appear on the scene, we need not be worried about our future.«
Elmar Krekeler / Die Welt, Berlin
»As daringly constructed as it is imaginatively recounted. A work seemingly inspired by the likes of John Iriving and T.C. Boyle.«
Peter M. Hetzel / Schweizer Illustrierte, Zurich
»›Torture the Artist‹ is an acid-tongued denunciation of the cultural industry, in best pop-tradition, pretty vanguard.«
L'Express, Paris
»This novel, a pointed commentary on the media machine that continuously grinds away at our culture, is by turns hilarious, thought-provoking, chilling, and sad. Goebel is a quirky, fresh, and relevant voice for our time.«
Library Journal

»... one of the most interesting and engaging books I've read in a while, a smart, witty, deeply moving parable ...«

Boston Globe
»Blimey! He really has class, this newcomer in the family of rocking authors, all crazy, all American, authors like Jim Nisbet, Jack O'Connell or T.C. Boyle.«
Cédric Fabre, Rolling Stone, Paris
»If Franz Kafka had lived into the 21st century and were as funny as Jon Stewart, he might have written a novel something like ›Torture the Artist‹.«
Courier-Journal, Louisville
»In ›Torture the Artist‹, Joey Goebel performs a mad exorcism on the society of the spectacle, unearthing the secrets of the American dream, doing it with the inventiveness of a twenty-first-century Mark Twain fuelled by love and sorrow.«
Peter Plate / American author

»Wickedly ingenious [. . .] Goebel’s ebulliently funny writing sparkles off the page.«

Caroline Leavitt / Boston Globe

»If you could bottle Joey Goebel's imagination and sell it by the glass, we'd all be in rehab. Torture the Artist – which addresses the premise that art, like grapes in a wine press, can be squeezed out of an artist by various torments – is as full of surprises as a brand new vintage, and Joey Goebel is the wunderkind of contemporary American fiction.«

Ed McClanahan / American novelist
»As long as new writers like Joey Goebel appear on the scene, we need not be worried about our future.«
Elmar Krekeler / Die Welt, Berlin
»As daringly constructed as it is imaginatively recounted. A work seemingly inspired by the likes of John Iriving and T.C. Boyle.«
Peter M. Hetzel / Schweizer Illustrierte, Zurich
»›Torture the Artist‹ is an acid-tongued denunciation of the cultural industry, in best pop-tradition, pretty vanguard.«
L'Express, Paris
»This novel, a pointed commentary on the media machine that continuously grinds away at our culture, is by turns hilarious, thought-provoking, chilling, and sad. Goebel is a quirky, fresh, and relevant voice for our time.«
Library Journal

»... one of the most interesting and engaging books I've read in a while, a smart, witty, deeply moving parable ...«

Boston Globe
»Blimey! He really has class, this newcomer in the family of rocking authors, all crazy, all American, authors like Jim Nisbet, Jack O'Connell or T.C. Boyle.«
Cédric Fabre, Rolling Stone, Paris
»If Franz Kafka had lived into the 21st century and were as funny as Jon Stewart, he might have written a novel something like ›Torture the Artist‹.«
Courier-Journal, Louisville
»In ›Torture the Artist‹, Joey Goebel performs a mad exorcism on the society of the spectacle, unearthing the secrets of the American dream, doing it with the inventiveness of a twenty-first-century Mark Twain fuelled by love and sorrow.«
Peter Plate / American author

»Wickedly ingenious [. . .] Goebel’s ebulliently funny writing sparkles off the page.«

Caroline Leavitt / Boston Globe
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