Pan - by Michael Clune (Hardcover)

About the Book

"Nicholas is fifteen when he forgets how to breathe. It's the '90s, and he's been living with his dad in the Chicago suburbs since his Russian-born mom kicked him out. One day in geometry class, Nicholas suddenly realizes that his hands are objects. The doctor says it's just panic, but Nicholas suspects that his real problem might not be a psychiatric one: maybe the pagan god Pan is trapped inside his body. As his paradigm for his own consciousness crumbles, Nicholas, his best friend Ty, and his maybe-girlfriend Sarah hunt for answers why-in Oscar Wilde and in Baudelaire, in rock 'n roll and in Bach, and in the mysterious, drugged-out Barn, where Todd's charismatic older brother Ian leads the high schoolers in rituals that might end up breaking more than just the law. Funny, provocative, and cerebral, Pan is a new masterpiece of the coming-of-age genre by Guggenheim fellow and literary scholar Michael W. Clune, whose memoir of heroin addiction, White Out, "one of the year's best books" (The New Yorker), earned him a cult readership. Now, in Pan, Clune drops us inside the human psyche, where we risk discovering that the forces controlling our inner lives could, in fact, be anything"--

Book Synopsis

"I steal language and ideas from Michael Clune." ―Ben Lerner, Pulitzer Prize-nominated author of The Topeka School

A strange and brilliant teenager's first panic attacks lead him down the rabbit hole in this wild, highly anticipated debut novel from one of our most distinctive literary minds

Nicholas is fifteen when he forgets how to breathe. He had plenty of reason to feel unstable already: He's been living with his dad in the bleak Chicago suburbs since his Russian-born mom kicked him out. Then one day in geometry class, Nicholas suddenly realizes that his hands are objects. The doctor says it's just panic, but Nicholas suspects that his real problem might not be a psychiatric one: maybe the Greek god Pan is trapped inside his body. As his paradigm for his own consciousness crumbles, Nicholas; his best friend, Ty; and his maybe-girlfriend, Sarah, hunt for answers why--in Oscar Wilde and in Charles Baudelaire, in rock and roll and in Bach, and in the mysterious, drugged-out Barn, where their classmate Tod's charismatic older brother Ian leads the high schoolers in rituals that might end up breaking more than just the law.

Thrilling, cerebral, and startlingly funny, Pan is a new masterpiece of the coming-of-age genre by Guggenheim fellow and literary scholar Michael Clune, whose memoir of heroin addiction, White Out--named one of The New Yorker's best books of the year--earned him a cult readership. Now, in Pan, the great novel of our age of anxiety, Clune drops us inside the human psyche, where we risk discovering that the forces controlling our inner lives could be more alien than we want to let ourselves believe.

Review Quotes

"With prose as strange as it is hypnotizing, Pan will leave you breathless and wanting for more." --Harper's Bazaar

"Evocative and erudite . . . The narrative barrels toward a frightening and enigmatic ending. This staggering coming-of-age saga is tough to shake." --Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Michael Clune writes lucid, shrewd, startling prose capable of laying bare pockets of human experience that might otherwise go without words. Pan proves his mesmeric ability to return our world and selves to us made strange and changed; there is no other writer like him." --Maggie Nelson, New York Times bestselling author of The Argonauts, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award

"A strange, vivid, and intense novel about the mystery of consciousness and the magic of childhood." --Tao Lin, author of Taipei, a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice

"I steal language and ideas from Michael Clune." --Ben Lerner, Pulitzer Prize-nominated author of The Topeka School; author of 10:04, one of the New York Times Best Books of the 21st Century

"No one writes like Michael Clune. His uncanny ability to fuse the universal with the arcane breaks new ground for the bildungsroman in Pan, where he dexterously stacks up spinning plates until, before you know it, there's nothing left but changeling magic. I didn't want the book to end, and I'm still trying to figure out how it transformed the inscrutable doom of adolescence into a symphonic odyssey with style to spare." --Blake Butler, author of Molly

"This strange anti-love child of Arthur Machen, Philip K. Dick, and William S. Burroughs infected my brain with odd humor, paranoia, and existential dread. Bursting with truly breathtaking prose, Pan is an ontological coming of age story for, well, the ages." --Paul Tremblay, New York Times bestselling author of Horror Movie and A Head Full of Ghosts

About the Author

Michael Clune is the critically acclaimed author of the memoirs Gamelife and White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin. His academic books include A Defense of Judgment, Writing Against Time, and American Literature and the Free Market. Clune's work has appeared in venues ranging from Harper's Magazine, Salon, and Granta to Behavioral and Brain Sciences, PMLA, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. His work has been recognized by fellowships and awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities, and others. He is currently the Samuel B. and Virginia C. Knight Professor of the Humanities at Case Western Reserve University and lives in Cleveland Heights, Ohio.