On December 4, 2011, The New Inquiry, BOMB Magazine, and ForYourArt will host a marathon reading of Frederic Tuten's visionary first novel, The Adventures of Mao on the Long March, published in 1971. This five-hour festival, free and open to the public, will bring together hundreds of participants, including some of America's most notable artists, novelists, poets, musicians, and filmmakers, to read the full text of Tuten's avant-garde masterwork. The Marathon Reading marks the finale of New Directions Publishing's year-long celebration of their 75th Anniversary.
The Adventures of Mao on the Long March presents the most heroic episode of the Chinese Revolution as mythopoetic odyssey in a radically experimental narrative style that freely mixes fiction, fact, citation, and parody to create a literary collage that is part fable, part newsreel, part pamphlet, part Emerson, part Lichtenstein, and part Godard. Mao has been a touchstone not only for the American literary avant-garde, but also for the visual arts, referencing and adapting to literature the techniques of Pop, Minimalism, Conceptualism, and Process Art. Groundbreaking in its time, the book's experimentalism continues to resonate with new readers raised on the mash-up aesthetics of the Internet age.
Featured readers will include
Walter Mosley, Amy Hempel, Lydia Davis,
Jon Robin Baitz, Kurt Andersen, Ross Bleckner,
Deborah Eisenberg, Francine du Plessix Gray,
John Guare, A.M. Homes,
Edmund White,
Oscar Hijuelos, Patricia Marx, Vito Acconci, Hans Ulrich Obrist, David Salle, and Cecily Brown. More readers will be announced in the coming weeks. Please check for updates at
www.MaoMarathon.com.
The Adventures of Mao on the Long March Reading Marathon is sponsored by Google Places, a personalized local recommendation engine powered by the reviews of users and their friends. As part of their sponsorship, Google Places will be offering attendees the opportunity to win a package of prizes, including subscriptions, books, artwork, and technological gadgets. Contest entries close at midnight on December 2, 2011. Full details can be found on the
MaoMarathon.com website.
