I Am Not Jackson Pollock

"Stunningly sophisticated storied in which everything is new . . . [Haskell] makes language seem limitless in its possibilities."—Los Angeles Times

"Haskell and his wild imagination put some fictional oomph into reality . . . The highly original, Hemingway-esque prose is just as colorful and provocative as Pollack's paintings."—Time Out New York

"In these wholly unique meditations on what it is to be human, John Haskell inhabits the famous and infamous, crawling inside outsiders ranging from painter Jackson Pollock, side-show act Topsy the elephant, the Psycho pathology of Anthony Perkins and Janet Leigh, and onto Capucine, Glenn Gould and more. Haskell makes the familiar his own—playing with language and history, turning time inside out, he delivers our culture back to us—made entirely new."—A.M. Homes

"John Haskell's I Am Not Jackson Pollack is a wonderfully intelligent, audacious and perverse collection of . . . what exactly? Fiction? Gossip? Film studies? Iconography? Liberty taking? Here's a book that defies the usual categories—but one thing's for sure, I savored every mythic, mesmerizing word of it."—Jim Crace

"The marriage of essay and story just entered brilliant and fresh territory with this revelatory collection."—The Buffalo News

"John Haskell turns works of art into stories and stories into a weird blend of magically unrealist commentary. His investigations into the dream-life of movies and the way they have insinuated themselves into our unconscious are, in turn, works of art. Flickering constantly between creative and critical writing, marrying both without ever quite settling on either, he uses an ensemble cast of genius (Pollock, Hitchcock, and Gould et al) as Roberto Calasso did the myths of classic antiquity—and has come up with something unsettling, unexpected and original."—Geoff Dyer

"Probing and frequently dark . . . it's a new way to look at the historical novel as well as a fresh approach to creating characters, and may be the literary equivalent of computer animation bringing dead celebrities back to life."—New York Post

"Wonderful, quirky, even extraordinary tales that intersperse Hollywood gossip with plumbing the depths of the human spirit."—Booklist

"Nine intriguing debut pieces explore the point where art and life intersect—or collide—in the lives of artists, performers and movie characters . . . Intellectually dazzling, emotionally chilly, and bound to provoke."—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Haskell evades definition in his audacious debut collection, creating an innovative blend of fact and fiction and deliberately eliding the difference between them. Most of the nine stories are imaginative extrapolations of the lives of real people (or, in some cases, real animals), such as the eponymous painter and his wife, Lee Krasner; Psycho stars Janet Leigh and Anthony Perkins . . . Haskell mixes anecdotes from the lives of these artists and celebrities with fictitious events to compose deceptively simple vignettes in which he distills and clarifies moments of intense psychological struggle . . . Haskell subtly explores questions of exploitation and agency through the eyes of his celebrity characters, winking all the while at his own attempts to get into their heads. His hypnotic writing creates its own genre, unsettling and quietly bizarre."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)