This fictional memoir, the first of an autobiographical trilogy, traces a self professed failure's nightmarish decent into the underside of American life and his resurrection to the wisdom that emerges from despair.

The death of Edmund Wilson precipitates an odyssey through the distorted literary landscape of America in search of Wilson's essence as the pre-eminent man of letters and the author's own creative wellsprings

"Of his generation's metafictioneers, Fred Exley has created the richest and most American body of work .... LAST NOTES tells tales about corruption, confession, and the often terrible beauty of the bonds of love."- VILLAGE VOICEFrederick Exley, the splenetic and prodigiously self-destructive narrator and protagonist of A FAN'S NOTES and PAGES FROM A COLD ISLAND, is alive, if not exactly well. In this exhilarating, scalding new novel, Ex recounts his death w...