Arts & Entertainment
Author Reading and Music Event with Kent Evans - A Crash Course On the Anatomy of Robots
NEW YORK, NY – July 2012 – Kent Evans has traveled the world extensively as a spoken-word artist, and he’s hitting the literary scene again – this time with a lyrically rich novel that could be described as Albert Camus’ L’etranger of our time.
Armed with a very existentialist protagonist, A Crash Course on the Anatomy of Robots (Sept. 17, 2012, Pangea Books) is a daring hybrid of adventure, verse and travel fiction, framed by a chronicle of self-revelation.
“The book is sort of a love song to being an artist, travel, the death of my parents, and disastrous relationships,” Evans said. “Damien’s struggle in the book was part of my way of piecing together what had happened to me.”
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In the book, Damien Wood’s path to adulthood seems delineated by astonishingly effortless success. Unaffected by people and circumstances, he hurls himself with abandon from one hollow commitment to another. Damien is a robot convincingly painting the self-portrait of a daredevil artist as a young man. As Damien’s mother dies after a long and agonizing illness, and 9/11 inaugurates a new reign of global terror, the full spectrum of Damien’s emotions, from desire to despair, begin to emerge. These birth pangs of humanness send him to Asia on a mordantly comic, frighteningly dark odyssey – until the violence which is the 21st Century’s signature claims him as its own: no longer a robot, Damien has become a wanted man.
“Stemming from a lyrical voice, the chapters range dizzyingly from a desire to handle real objects, real people and real experiences to the realization of its actual impossibility. Humans, robots, love, music, and the globe collide and ultimately develop into a rich, lively and stimulating inquiry into existence itself,” said Inés Ferrero Cándenas, author of Gendering the Marvellous and El Caracol de Arena.
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And Tony Cohan, author of Calparaiso, Opium, Native State, and On Mexican Time, called Crash Course “a harrowing, smart, lyric report.”
As an added bonus to the book, Evans collaborated with musicians for an original soundtrack available on iTunes prior to the novel’s release and free with the Kindle version.
Evans is the author of Malas Ondas: Lime, Sand Sex and Salsa in the land of conquistadors, a semi-autobiographical novel about self-destruction throughout Latin America and finding love. A fixture on the spoken word and experimental art scene in the 90’s, the internationally acclaimed artist has performed at such venues as the Festival Internacional Cervantino, Madison Square Garden Theater, Acadamie Beaux Arts in Paris and Nuvorican Poets Café in Greenwich Village. His creative non-fiction and opinion pieces have appeared in numerous national pop-culture and literary zines and publications. Evans grew up between New York, Connecticut and Rhode Island, and after graduating from New York University, began traveling throughout the US, Canada, Mexico, Europe, Asia and the Caribbean.
