Dream of Venus (Or Living Pictures)

Publisher Marketing: DREAM OF VENUS (OR LIVING PICTURES), a novel set in the 1939 New York World's Fair, is a speculative history reanimating the last great international fair this world would ever know. Meshing actualities with invention, DREAM OF VENUS renders a future past that is nostalgic and predictive, an account of hope and longing at the onset of World War II. Focusing on Zeke Lichtenquist - -an artist moved into the Fair's Town of Tomorrow -- VENUS takes us on a search for authenticity and meaning. Franklin Roosevelt, Albert Einstein, New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, and the Fair's president Grover Whalen all pop in and out, players in a fabled New York of the late 1930s. Publishers Weekly compared the novel to the work of Nathaniel West, William Gaddis, and E. L. Doctorow, lauding DREAM for "challenging the distinction between fiction and fact." Book Magazine recommended DREAM OF VENUS as "a risky and ingenious experiment that makes the novel like the fairgrounds." Donald Margulies praised DREAM OF VENUS as "an impressive work of historical fiction," the author deploying "the past as a prism through which he views our present and has ironic, witty, and disturbing things to say about the particular dream life of Americans." Steve Erickson judged DREAM OF VENUS "the gateway to a secret new literature...beyond the limits of what today's constricted fiction can conceive." Review Citations: Publishers Weekly 01/17/2000 pg. 44 (EAN 9780966348002, Hardcover) Contributor Bio:  Beller, Miles Beller is Los Angeles consulting editor of the Carl Jung Institute's Psychological Perspectives and contributing reviewer for Artweek. Contributor Bio:  Updike, John John Updike was born in 1932, in Shillington, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954, and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker, and since 1957 has lived in Massachusetts. He is the author of fifty-odd previous books, including twenty novels and numerous collections of short stories, poems, and criticism. His fiction has won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the American Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Award, and the Howells Medal.