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Predator

A Memoir, a Movie, an Obsession

Graywolf Press

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ISBN10: 1644452006
ISBN13: 9781644452004

Paperback

272 Pages

$16.00

CA$22.00

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In his first memoir, Ander Monson guides readers through a scene-by-scene exploration of the 1987 film Predator, which he has watched 146 times. Some fighters might not have time to bleed, but Monson has the patience to consider their adventure, one frame at a time. He turns his obsession into a lens through which he poignantly examines his own life, formed by mainstream, white, male American culture. Between scenes, Monson delves deeply into his adolescence in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and Riyadh, his role as a father and the loss of his own mother, and his friendships with men bound by the troubled camaraderie depicted in action and sci-fi blockbusters. Along with excursions into the conflicted pleasures of cosplay and first-person shooters, he imagines himself beside the poet and memoirist Paul Monette, who wrote the novelization of the movie while his partner was dying of AIDS.

A sincere and playful book that lovingly dissects the film, Predator also offers questions and critiques of masculinity, fandom, and their interrelation with acts of mass violence. In a stirring reversal, one chapter exposes Monson through the Predator’s heat-seeking vision, asking him, “What do you know about the workings of the hidden world?” As Monson brings us into the brilliant depths of the film and its universe, the hunt begins.

Reviews

Praise for Predator

“I haven’t seen Predator or any other action movie, for that matter—am I a man?—but this is my favorite book of Ander Monson’s. It’s the most sustained, the most lucid, the most serious (the funniest), the most complicit, the most heartbreaking/discomfiting, the most ‘relevant’ to our ‘moment.’ Quite simply, a great book.”—David Shields

“A maze of riffs with the Predator franchise in the center, always allusive and illusive. One of the more fascinating and eccentric books I’ve read this decade.”—Jeff VanderMeer

“This is a book about the movie Predator and also a book about the country and the era and the culture that produced the movie Predator. It's a book about that time and about this time right now, and many points in between. This is a book filled with ideas and also an intensely personal book, one that only Ander Monson could have written—with his wit, honesty and considerable powers of insight. Heavy and light, serious and funny, and above all deeply original.”—Charles Yu

“In a country where incomprehensible, violent tragedies are becoming commonplace, Monson finds clarity processing the new American way against the backdrop of his favorite movie . . . Monson finds a cracking pace that imbues [Predator] with an improbable resonance, at once lowbrow and mesmerizingly cogent . . . An unlikely treatise on manhood with the charm of a late-night movie marathon.”Kirkus Reviews

“Written in loose-jointed yet elegant prose that guiltily savors Predator’s pleasures, Monson’s subtle, twisty appreciations and critiques . . . transform the movie into a penetrating commentary on the contradictions of manhood. Movie buffs will want to snap this up.”Publishers Weekly