The Love Song of Monkey

A Novel by Michael Graziano

In a surreal exile on the floor of the Atlantic, a young man faces his own death and his wife’s infidelity. With a deepening understanding of himself and his place in the world, Monkey travels a path through the most important landscape of all – the inner landscape of the soul. Monkey is a meditation on the simple, inexplicable, and lasting power of love, cast in the metaphor of a journey to the depths of the ocean floor. Precise and beautifully crafted, this modern fable is rich with humor and deep thought.

"An amalgam of fairy tale, satire, science fiction, medical thriller, and soap opera, it is difficult to fathom that a novel so brief can be so epic in scope. Though it hearkens back to an earlier generation of writers like Shelley and Verne, it inhabits a place on the modern literary grid closer to the quirky style of George Saunders than to the popular novels of Michael Crichton. This rewarding and compelling tale, though it strains belief at every turn, ultimately weaves its way to a place of universal hope and enduring love. Inventive and deftly crafted, The Love Song of Monkey is a tale no reader will soon forget."
—Eric Linder, owner of Yellow Umbrella Books, Chatham, Mass.

"An hilarious, dark, brittle take on post-modern medicine, love triangles, the dense emptiness of contemporary life, and the liberating power of contemplative self-discovery. Part magic realism, part theater of the absurd, and part over-the-top, unrepentant spoof, this novella packs more into its meager 100 pages than do most epic trilogies. At its heart is a meditation on the simple, inexplicable and lasting power of love, cast in the metaphor of a journey—to the depths of the ocean floor, across volcanic eruptions and along the ledges of skyscrapers.

From quirky—or should that be Kwarky?—opening to the classic lovers’ reunion ending where not even death can part them, Graziano has fabricated the rare kind of tale that the reader can honestly say ends much too quickly. Perfectly woven, self-enclosed, multi-faceted … It’s Kosinski’s Being There sprinkled with a strong dose of Frankenstein … the kind of simplicity that speaks volumes."
—Michael Mirolla, author of The Formal Logic of Emotion

Michael S. A. Graziano, professor of psychology at Princeton University, puts his knowledge of the human psyche to brilliant use in his award-winning fiction. Of Monkey, he says: “Two lines of T. S. Elliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” got into my head and rummaged around for years: ‘I should have been a pair of ragged claws/scuttling across the floors of silent seas.’ I thought, what would it feel like to actually be those claws on the bottom of the ocean? What psychological state of love and desperation would lead one down there? I finally decided to write what I felt about those two lines of poetry, and the result was The Love Song of Monkey.”

CATEGORY: Fiction
PAGES: 152
TRIM: 5.25 x 7.5
ISBN: 978-0-9815148-0-2
PRICE: $13.95 / Paperback Original
Pub Date: November 2008 

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