About
Straight White Male Synopsis
Kennedy Marr is a novelist from the old school. Irish, acerbic, and a borderline alcoholic and sex-addict, his mantra is drink hard, write hard and try to screw every woman you meet. He's writing film scripts in LA, fucking, drinking and insulting his way through Californian society, but also suffering from writers block and unpaid taxes. Then a solution presents itself - Marr is to be the unlikely recipient of the W. F. Bingham Prize for Outstanding Contribution to Modern Literature, an award worth half a million pounds. But it does not come without a price: he must spend a year teaching at the English university where his ex-wife and estranged daughter now reside. As Kennedy acclimatises to the sleepy campus, inspiring revulsion and worship in equal measure, he's forced to reconsider his precarious lifestyle. Incredible as it may seem, there might actually be a father and a teacher lurking inside this 'preening, narcissistic, priapic, sociopath'. Or is there. Straight White Male is a no-holds-barred look into the mid-life crisis and the contemporary male sexual psyche. It is a brilliant new satire from one of Britain's sharpest writers.
About This Edition
| ISBN: |
9780099592150 |
| Publication date: |
3rd July 2014 |
| Author: |
John Niven |
| Publisher: |
Windmill Books an imprint of Cornerstone |
| Format: |
Paperback |
| Pagination: |
384 pages |
| Primary Genre |
Modern and Contemporary Fiction
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| Recommendations: |
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Press Reviews
John Niven Press Reviews
Straight White Male is a heartbreaker; a poignant literary treatise on the all-too-mortal battle between human individual desire and social need, disguised as a high-octane novel of laddish excess. -- Irvine Welsh
There's nothing faster, sadder or funnier than John Niven on men. I cried three times and laughed fifty. Magnificent. -- Caitlin Moran
John Niven has much, much more fun with Kennedy's drinking, fornicating, fighting, time-wasting antics than with his putative rehabilitation, and the reader does, too. We can't help rooting for Kennedy, a seducer but never a misogynist; a charmer who rushes at life with zest and brio ... Straight White Male is a sharp and knowing satire of the film industry, publishing and academia ... Thoroughly enjoyable. -- Suzi Feay Guardian
Author
About John Niven
John J. Niven was born in Irvine, Ayrshire in Scotland. He worked as an A & R man, and the music industry became the subject of his bestselling book Kill Your Friends, which was described as 'the best British novel since Trainspotting' (Word magazine) and is currently being made into a film. John Niven is also the author of the novella Music from Big Pink and the novels The Amateurs and The Second Coming, and he has written for The Times, Independent, Word and FHM among other publications. He lives in Buckinghamshire, but spends time in Los Angeles where he works as a screenwriter.
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