Tripticks - by Ann Quin (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

First published in 1972, Ann Quin's fourth and final novel was a radical break from the introspective style she had developed in Three and Passages: a declaration of independence from all expectations.

Brashly experimental, ribald, and hilarious, Tripticks maps new territories for the novel--aspiring to a form of pop art via the drawings of the artist Carol Annand and anticipating the genre-busting work of Kathy Acker through collage and gory satire.

Splattering its pages with the story of a man being chased across a nightmarish America by his "first X-wife," and her "schoolboy gigolo," Tripticks was ground zero for the collision of punk energy with high style.

Review Quotes

"Quin's spare prose line--delphic, obscure and hauntingly suggestive--creates a comparably vertiginous kind of enchantment. To submit to this unique book's spell is to experience, in language, a 'fantastic dance of images, shapes, forms.'" --Sam Sack, Wall Street Journal

"Quin works over a small area with the finest of tools. Every page, every word gives evidence of her care and workmanship." --New York Times

"Quin's prose never falters; it's stunning." --Paris Review

"Quin was a writer ahead of her time." --Publishers Weekly

"Vividly intense and almost palpably immediate." --Irish Times

"Quin uses carefully crafted imagery to stimulate the reader's subconscious." --Booklist

"Quin tosses out hefty dashes of mordant humour and caustic wit." --Library Journal

"I suspect that Ann Quin will eventually be viewed, alongside B. S. Johnson and Alexander Trocchi, as one of the few mid-century British novelists who actually, in the long term, matter." --Tom McCarthy

"Ann Quin is a master painter of interiors, of voices that mosaic as they catch the light at strange, stirring angles." --Chloe Aridjis

"Quin's militant refusal to compromise flavours her writing: you either take her on her own terms, or not at all. Richer and stranger than the satisfactions of mainstream fiction." --Jonathan Coe

"Quin understood she was on to something new." --Deborah Levy

"One of our greatest ever novelists. Ann Quin's was a new British working-class voice that had not been heard before: it was artistic, modern, and--dare I say it--ultimately European." --Lee Rourke

"One of Britain's most adventurous post-war writers. Psychologically dark and sexually daring." --Juliet Jacques

"Rare enough is a book that begins by stating its intention--rarer still one that proceeds to do seemingly everything it can to avoid following the path its intention has laid." --Danielle Dutton

About the Author

Ann Quin (1936-1973) was a working-class writer from Brighton, England. She was at the forefront of British experimentalism in the 1960s along with B. S. Johnson and Alan Burns, and also lived in the United States in the mid-sixties, working closely with American writers and poets, including Robert Creeley. Prior to her death, she published four novels: Berg (1964), Three (1966), Passages (1969) and Tripticks (1972). A collection of short stories and a fragment of her unfinished last novel, The Unmapped Country (edited by Jennifer Hodgson), was published by And Other Stories in 2018.