
Named one of 2016's best books by The Believer, VICE, Gulf Coast, Essay Daily, HTMLGIANT, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and Drawn & Quarterly.
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Praise:"A unique, curvilinear collage of texts found and imagined . . . a biography-in-fragments that fingers the cracks in its own composition and emerges with a unique form that’s neither quite fiction, essay, or film critique but partakes of the pleasures of all three."
-The Believer
"[Madeleine E.] very quickly takes on a mysterious, drug-like momentum of its own. Like a great mystery film, it makes you want to poke holes in all the storylines around you. It's a refreshing, haunted take on the essay and the memoir, one that complicates both by refusing to let you say for sure where either ends."
-Blake Butler, VICE
"Complex, melancholy [. . .] Madeleine E. is a layered patchwork of quotes and the author’s cinematic analysis, memoir, and fiction."
-The AV Club

-Benjamin Hale, author of The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore
"Madeleine E. is a riveting examination of the self (or selves), spun from the yarn skein in Gabriel Blackwell's labyrinthine mind. Using Hitchcock's masterpiece Vertigo as a springboard for cultural and critical investigation and personal narrative, Blackwell has managed to write an impossibly entertaining book—indeed, a philosophical page turner."
-Amber Sparks, author of The Unfinished World and Other Stories
"The first time I saw Lynch’s Mulholland Dr., I watched it again immediately, so mesmerizing was its world. I’ve done this with a few other films, but never with a book—until now. Once I got to the last page of Gabriel Blackwell’s genre-transcending Madeleine E., I quickly returned to the first. The book is as captivating and addictive as Vertigo, the film Blackwell illuminates and re-imagines. On the level of criticism alone, the book is revelatory: Hitchcock has never appeared so engrossingly strange and alive. But Madeleine E. is also a profound exploration of identity, doubling, obsession, romantic love, perception, falling, the power of art. Interspersed among the collages of philosophical insight are hypnotic narratives about a man named Gabriel Blackwell, whose many possible lives reveal the dizzying potentials of our own. This is a wondrous book."
-Eric G. Wilson, author of Keep It Fake and Against Happiness
"Madeleine E. breathes new life into the novel, the monograph, the commonplace book, the memoir . . . This is a book that will be treasured by readers who are eager to glimpse the horizons of contemporary writing as well by those who appreciate a good old-fashioned page-turner. Gabriel Blackwell’s writing proves that a genre-defying literature is not only possible, it’s necessary."
-Evan Lavender-Smith, author of Avatar and From Old Notebooks
Excerpts:
[INT. Elster's Office (DAY)]—The Fanzine
[INT. Scottie's Bedroom (NIGHT)] & [INT. Sanitarium Bedroom (DAY)]—originally in Portland Review, republished on Big Other
[EXT. Redwoods (DAY)] & [EXT. Cypress Point or Point Lobos (DAY)]—The Collapsar
[EXT. Podesta Baldocchi (LATE AFTERNOON)] & [INT. Judy's Hotel Room (NIGHT)]—3:AM Magazine
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