The Book of Portraiture

A novel of art, history, desire, and humanity
by
Steve Tomasula

$17.95 paper, ISBN 978-1-57366-128-7
350 pp, 5.5” x 8.5”, paperback, two-color throughout, including artwork, and illustrations. Jacket and book design by Robert P. Sedlack, Jr.
Adult Fiction/ Experimental Fiction
Publication Date: May 7, 2006

SYNOPSIS
The Book of Portraiture is a postmodern epic in writing and images. A desert nomad struggles at the close of the ancient world to inscribe himself into life, and centuries later a Renaissance artist attempts to overcome his lowly origins by painting nobility.

Throughout Steve Tomasula's arresting tour de force, people seek to achieve what they long for by representing it. An early twentieth-century psychoanalyst in search of a cure for sexual neurosis discovers the reflection of his own yearning in a female client, and an accidental community of twenty-first century image-makers connects the pixels to bring their group portrait into focus. Across a canvas that spans centuries, the several narrators of this novel look through the lens of their own time and portray objects of desire in paint, dreams, photography, electronic data, and genetic code. Together their portraits comprise a collage of styles and habits of mind. The Book of Portraiture is a novel about the irrepressible impulse to picture ourselves, and how, through this picturing, we continually re-create what it means to be human.

ADVANCE PRAISE
Tomasula's five interlocking chapters cross continents and centuries and aesthetic sensibilities to build to a dazzling and dizzying whole. The Book of Portraiture is one of those rare books that manage to be at once emotionally and theoretically satisfying.
--Brian Evenson

This novel is a grand historical account of how the act of represeting others always includes a representation of the self. ... Across the span of centuries in the novel, all language falls in glorious slow motion. ... The chapter on the pschoanalyst and his patient is...particulary hilarious and creepy.... The Book of Portraiture reimagines what the novel, particularly the historical novel, might mean in the digital world, and it does so with verve, gusto, and style.
--McKenzie Mark, Bookforum

Once again, Steve Tomasula has fabricated an incisive and sly commentary on art's way of being in the world, and the manner in which it intersects, and conflicts, with our perceptions. Virtuosic in its execution, and sublime in its discernment, The Book of Portraiture is an able continuation of Tomasula's ongoing project to redraw the boundaries of contemporary fiction.
--Christopher Sorrentino

Think of Swift, Groddeck, Lautreamont, and George Carlin conversing together in a large wastebin-up to their chins in 21st century sweepings-and you will begin to have an idea of Tomasula's very funny, very smart and downright scary epic vision.
--Rikki Ducornet

Available from Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, University of Alabama Press, or where ever interesting books are sold.