In this book of autobiographical essays, an award-winning novelist reflects on childhood, love, his close-knit Jewish family, his father, and more.
In My Father’s Guitar and Other Imaginary Things, Joseph Skibell’s first nonfiction work, he mines the events of his own life to create a captivating collection of personal essays. Often comic, sometimes tender, these stories are 100 percent profoundly true. Skibell misremembers the guitar his father promised him; together, he and a telemarketer dream of a better world; a major work of Holocaust art turns out to have been painted by his cousin. Woven together, the stories paint a complex portrait of a man and his family: a businessman father and an artistic son and the difficult love between them; complicated uncles, cousins, and sisters; a haunted house; and—of course—an imaginary guitar. The pleasure in these pieces is discovering along with the author that catastrophes, fantasies, and delusions are what give sweetness and shape to our lives…
“The voice is so beguiling, the tone so sweet and hilarious, you quickly realize that you are in the hands of a master. . . . This is a book to be prized in the way readers prize the work of Charles Portis.” —James Magnuson, author of Famous Writers I Have Known
“Colorful and endearing, the book will appeal to readers who appreciate Augusten Burroughs–style, real-life anecdotal ponderings focused on familial ties and how life’s eternal cycle of enchantment and disillusionment somehow sustains us.” —Kirkus Reviews
