Over at the Observer, Leon Neyfakh is reporting that Faber & Faber has bought a novel from Nick Cave, with lead editor Mitzi Angel describing the book, The Death of Bunny Munro, as the “centerpeice” of her first frontlist at Faber—that assessment coming from an interview by Cave’s agent, Jamie Byng, in The Bookseller last week. (UPDATE: Angel tells Neyfakh that Byng’s assessement is not quite accurate, but that the Cave novel is nevertheless a significant acquisition.)
That leads Neyfakh to speculate as to whether a novel from Cave, the former lead singer of the Birthday Party and, since 1984, the frontman of the Bad Seeds, represents the “sophisticated literary fiction with an emphasis on debut novels” that Angel was hired to bring to Faber, comparing the novel to projects from the previous Faber regime like Billy Corgan’s poetry and Courtney Love’s scrapbooks. But those of us who remember Cave’s And the Ass Saw the Angel, published back in 1989, aren’t so sure there’s a contradiction. Granted, our memories can be somewhat hazy two decades on, but we seem to recall it was a really good novel, although your tolerance for dialect-inflected narration may vary. (Fun fact: Cave once chewed us out on a nationally syndicated radio show when we called in to say how much his novel reminded us of Flannery O’Connor! But we still like him anyway!)
(pictures: Wikipedia)