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The Sweep of the Second Hand

The Sweep of the Second Hand

Dean Monti

In this comic debut, Malcolm Cicchio loses one minute of sleep with each passing night; at that rate, he figures that his heart will explode in 16 months. The manager of a failing art film theater, he has recently split up with Lena, his girlfriend of seven years, who is set to marry a successful cardiologist. He feels that he might as well have loser tattooed on his forehead. And then the babes seemingly start falling from the sky. First he meets Anne, who answers the phone at an emergency switchboard and admits that her favorite movie is Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries. This is reason enough to schedule a two-day film festival, to which he invites Soren Sonderby, a Swedish actor who claims to have had the limp-on part of a leper in Bergman's Seventh Seal. Then there's Darlene, the singer with the Circadian Rhythm Section, who wrangles an invitation to play Lena's wedding the same weekend as the film festival with Malcolm in tow. That string of days serves as the book's culmination when everything may or may not come together for Malcolm in the middle. A comic novel all too often can be little more than a string of gags, but Monti begs comparison with Woody Allen and Nick Hornby. Library Journal

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Publisher : Penguin Putnam Berkley Signature Edition Language : English
Genre : Literature Release : July 29, 2001
Sub-genre : Humorous Fiction

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Biography

Dean Monti

Dean Monti started writing at age two, but nothing really legible until age five. Since then his work has appeared in several literary journals including Prairie Light Review, ELF: The Eclectic Literary Forum, and Ellipsis. His critically-acclaimed novel, The Sweep of the Second Hand, was published by Academy Chicago Publishers and reprinted in paperback by Penguin Putnam Berkley Signature. He is the author of several full-length and one-act plays and has had works staged in Chicago and Norfolk, Va. He has also taught creative writing at Columbia College and College of DuPage. He is currently working on new novels and short stories and recently completed an MFA in Creative Writing at Queens University. He lives in a suburb of Chicago.
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