title: Andrew's Brain: A Novel
author:  E.L. Doctorow 
description: <b>Praise for <i>Andrews Brain</i></b><br /> <b><i></i></b><br />Too compelling to put down . . . fascinating, sometimes funny, often profound . . . Andrew is a provocatively interesting and even sympathetic character. . . . The novel seamlessly combines Doctorows remarkable prowess as a literary stylist with deep psychological storytelling pitting truth against delusion, memory and perception, consciousness and craziness. . . . [Doctorow] takes huge creative risksthe best kind.<b><i>USA Today</i></b><br /><i></i><br /><i>Andrews Brain</i> is cunning. . . . [A] sly book . . . This babbling Andrew is a casualty of his times, binding his wounds with thick wrappings of words, ideas, bits of story, whatever his spinning mind can unspool for him. . . . One of the things that makes [Andrew] such a terrific comic creation is that hes both maddeningly self-delusive and scarily self-aware: Hes a fool, but hes no innocent. . . . Andrew may not be able to enjoy his brain, but Doctorow, freely choosing to inhabit this characters whirligig consciousness, can.<b><i>The New York Times Book Review</i></b><br /> <b><i></i></b><br />A tantalising tour de force . . . a journey worth taking . . . With exhilarating brio, the book plays off . . . two contrasting takes on mind and brain. . . . [<i>Andrews Brain</i>encompasses] an astonishing range of modes: vaudeville humour, tragic romance, philosophical speculation. . . . It fizzes with intellectual energy, verbal pyrotechnics and satiric flair.<b><i>The Sunday Times</i>(London)</b><br /><b></b><br />Dramatic . . . cunning and beautiful . . . strange and oddly fascinating, this book: a musing, a conjecture, a frivolity, a deep interrogatory, a hymn.<b><i>San Francisco Chronicle</i></b><br /><br />Provocative . . . a story aswirl in a whirlpool of neuroscience, human relations, loss, guilt and recent American history . . . Doctorow reveals his mastery in the sheen of a text that is both window and mirror. Reading his work is akin to soaring in a glider. Buoyed by invisible breath, readers encounter stunning vistas stretching to horizons theyve never imagined.<b><i>The Plain Dealer</i></b><br /><b><i></i></b><br />Andrews ruminations can be funny, and his descriptions gorgeous.<b>Associated Press</b><br /><br />[An] evocative, suspenseful novel about the deceptive nature of human consciousness.<b><i>More</i></b><br /> <b><i></i></b><br />A quick and acutely intelligent read.<b><i>Entertainment Weekly</i></b><br /> <i></i><br />Mind-bending . . . a fascinating and perplexing examination of a human being, invented by Doctorow but very real, who has suffered great trauma and desperately needs to believe he is not a monster.<b><i>St. Louis Post-Dispatch</i></b><br /> <b><i></i></b><br /> Absorbing . . . In Doctorows capable hands, Andrew is revealed to be a unique and sympathetic characteryoure just never sure whether hes a redeemed lout or criminally insane. . . . Besides the wonderful prose, the book has humor and warmth and entertaining twists of plot.<b><i>Houston Chronicle</i></b><br /> <i></i><br /> This is a brief book and, like many of the authors recent offerings, a seemingly simple pleasure. But Doctorow cannot do anything simply, and he cant help but write well. His lines in passing are the sort that other writers might work for years to perfect. And his insights, beautifully embedded in an irresistible story, are worthy of the best sort of big book.<b>Minneapolis <i>Star Tribune</i></b><br /> <b><i></i></b><br /> [Doctorow] locates and amplifies the human emotions that lend poignancy to particular moments in individual lives. . . . He illuminates these concepts by taking us inside the mind of a fully formed figurea man whose pain, fear, desire and suffering we come to know and identify with. The journey from this novels unsettling, parabolical beginning to its ambiguous end is frequently disorienting, but its worth the trip.<b><i>Pittsburgh Post-Gazette</i></b><br /><br />In stunning command of every aspect of this taut, unnerving, riddling tale, virtuoso Doctorow confronts the persistent mysteries of the mindtrauma and memory, denial and culpabilityas he brings us back to one deeply scarring time of shock and lies, war and crime. Writing in concert with Twain, Poe, and Kafka, Doctorow distills his mastery of language, droll humor, well-primed imagination, and political outrage into an exquisitely disturbing, morally complex, tragic, yet darkly funny novel of the collective American unconscious and human nature in all its perplexing contrariness. Word will travel quickly about this intense and provocative novel by best-selling literary giant Doctorow.<b><i>Booklist </i>(starred review)</b><br /> <b></b><br /> Through this dialectic narrative, Doctorow connects to the common theme seen throughout his work: ones history is often a battle between memory and self-struggle to maintain an image of morality and adequacy. Doctorow deftly captures the complex but beautiful vagaries of life in clean, simple language.<b><i>Library Journal</i> (starred review)</b><br /><br /><b>Praise for E. L. Doctorow</b><br /> <b></b><br /> On every level, [Doctorows] work is powerful. . . . His sensitivity to language is perfectly balanced, and complemented by a gigantic vision.<b>Jennifer Egan</b><br /> <br /> E. L. Doctorow is a national treasure, and I mean this in a very specific sense: He has rewarded us, these forty-five years, with a vision of ourselves, as a people, a vision possessed of what I might call aspirational vervehe sees us clearly and tenderly, just as we are, but also sees <i>past</i> thatto what we might, at our best, become.<b>George Saunders</b><br /> <br /> [His great topic is] the reach of American possibility, in which plain lives take on the cadences of history. . . . Doctorows prose tends to create its own landscape, and to become a force that works in opposition to the power of social reality.<b>Don DeLillo</b><br /> <b></b><br /> A writer of dazzling gifts and boundless imaginative energy.<b>Joyce Carol Oates, <i>The New Yorker</i></b><br /> <br /> One of our greatest living writers . . . a virtuosic storyteller with enormous range.<b><i>People</i></b><br /> <br /> Doctorow is a magician. . . . His prose is dazzling.<b><i>Vogue</i></b><br /><br /><br /><i>From the Hardcover edition.</i>
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  _Andrew’s Brain_ is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all
  characters with the exception of some well-known historical and public
  figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed
  as real. Where real-life historical or public figures appear, the situations,
  incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and
  are not intended to depict actual events or to change the entirely fictional
  nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living
  or dead is entirely coincidental.
  
  
  
  
  
  Copyright © 2014 by E. L. Doctorow
  
  
  
  
  
  All rights reserved.
  
  
  
  
  
  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House
  Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House
  Company, New York.
  
  
  
  
  
  RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House
  LL