From the author of Remainder, and two novels short-listed for the Booker Prize, C, and Satin Island, a widescreen odyssey through the medical labs, computer graphics studios, military research centers, and other dark zones where the frontiers of potential—to cure, kill, understand or entertain—are constantly tested and refined. Bodies in motion. Birds, bees and bobsleighs. What is the force that moves the sun and other stars? Where’s our fucking airplane? What’s inside Box 808, and why does everybody want it? Deep within the archives of time-and-motion pioneer Lillian Gilbreth lies a secret. Famous for producing solid light-tracks that captured the path of workers’ movements, Gilbreth helped birth the era of mass observation and big data. But did she also, as her broken correspondence with a young Soviet physicist suggests, discover in her final days a “perfect” movement, one that would “change everything”? An international hunt begins for the one box missing from her records, and we follow contemporary motion-capture consultant Mark Phocan, as well as his collaborators and shadowy antagonists, across geopolitical fault lines and through strata of personal and collective history. Meanwhile, work is under way on the blockbuster movie Incarnation, an epic space tragedy. As McCarthy peers through the screen, or veil, of technological modernity to reveal the underlying symbolic structures of human experience, The Making of Incarnation weaves a set of stories one inside the other, rings within rings, a perpetual motion machine.

In this essay, based on a talk he gave in Zurich, award-winning British novelist Tom McCarthy ("Remainder", "C", "Satin Island") unearthes a pattern, a rationale that is working both in and against the canon of modern(ist) literature, of authors such as Thomas Pynchon, Maurice Blanchot, Thomas Mann, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce and William Faulkner. McCarthy tackles a specific obsession with time that haunts their works; a time that is marked by arrest, pause, suspension, interval, eternal moments, tool-downage, waiting. Recessional time, as it were. Time-out-of-time. This is precisely that time (or tense) of fiction that is central to Tom McCarthy's own writing. The essay is followed by a conversation with the author in which he discusses his own practice of writing.

A brilliant epochal saga from the acclaimed author of Remainder ('One of the great English novels of the past ten years' – Zadie Smith), C takes place in the early years of the twentieth century and ranges from western England to Europe to North Africa. Serge Carrefax spends his childhood at Versoie House, where his father teaches deaf children to speak when he's not experimenting with wireless telegraphy. Sophie, Serge's sister and only connection to the world at large, takes outrageous liberties with Serge's young body – which may explain the unusual sexual predilections that haunt him for the rest of his life. After recuperating from a mysterious illness at a Bohemian spa, Serge serves in World War I as a radio operator. C culminates in a bizarre scene in an Egyptian catacomb where all Serge's paths and relationships at last converge. Tom McCarthy's mesmerizing, often hilarious accomplishment effortlessly blends the generational breadth of Ian McEwan with the postmodern wit of Thomas Pynchon and marks a writer rapidly becoming one of the most significant and original voices of his generation.

A carefully curated collection of adventure classicsA Lyons American classicFresh, new series designThere has never been a more exciting collection of stories that celebrate the indomitable spirit of the American character. These accounts all have one thing in common: They capture the grit and spirit of adventure that made America what it is today.

From the author of Remainder (the major feature-film adaption of which will be released in 2015) and C (short-listed for the Booker Prize), and winner of the Windham Campbell Prize, a novel that promises to give us the first and last word on the world--modern, postmodern, whatever world you think you are living in. When we first meet U., our narrator, he is waiting out a delay in the Turin airport. Clicking through corridors of trivia on his laptop he stumbles on information about the Shroud of Turin--and is struck by the degree to which our access to the truth is always mediated by a set of veils or screens, with any world built on those truths inherently unstable. A "corporate ethnographer," U. is tasked with writing the "Great Report," an ell-encompassing document that would sum up our era. Yet at every turn, he feels himself overwhelmed by the ubiquity of data, lost in buffer zones, wandering through crowds of apparitions. Madison, the woman he is...

The first novel written by Booker finalist Tom McCarthy—acclaimed author of Remainder and C—Men in Space is set in a Central Europe rapidly fragmenting after the fall of communism. It follows an oddball cast—dissolute bohemians, political refugees, a football referee, a disorientated police agent, and a stranded astronaut—as they chase a stolen painting from Sofia to Prague and onward. Planting the themes that McCarthy’s later works develop, here McCarthy questions the meaning of all kinds of space—physical, political, emotional, and metaphysical—as reflected in the characters’ various disconnections. What emerges is a vision of humanity adrift in history, and a world in a state of disintegration.With an afterword by Simon Critchley, author of The Book of Dead PhilosophersReview“Sophisticated. . . . A rich, encyclopedic text whose knowledge isn’t confined to aesthetics. . . . An intellectually voracious cross section of a historical moment, and a thrilling indication of the vitality of the contemporary British novel.”—The New York Times Book Review“[McCarthy] is an agile and venturesome writer, adeptly shaping these disparate voices into a thrilling and satisfying symphony.”—The New Yorker“Imaginative, brooding, and stoutly thematic—even a bit romantic. The pacing is unique, and McCarthy is without a doubt an Important Literary Voice. . . . It’s impossible to ignore the beautiful style of the prose. . . . It is clever that a treatise on the universal tendency to cut-and-paste, literally and figuratively, is set in the pre-email, pre-digital world. It is almost as if the goings-on were recorded in lush analog: everything that comes after moves too fast for the human eye to observe.”—The Houston Chronicle“There’s an unmistakably desperate edge to the social frenzy among the Prague expats chronicled in Tom McCarthy’s second novel, Men In Space. Their involvement in an art heist gone wrong on the eve of the Czech Republic’s creation ultimately provides these foreigners with a sense of reckoning that suffuses all their good times. . . . McCarthy reports their struggles with irony but also kindness.”—The Onion A.V. Club“McCarthy depicts cosmopolitan street life with astonishing detail and humor. . . . Worth quoting at length.”—Open Letters Monthly“Intriguing. . . . McCarthy deftly knits together a continuous, chapterless narrative of changing viewpoints. The central story is intense and interesting. . . . Best described as Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly meets Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting; this is a tribute to what the novel can be. Enthusiastically recommended.”—Library Journal“The author, who lived through this tumultuous historical period and wrote this book in Prague, makes tangible the heady rush of freedom; his bone-deep understanding gives this transformative period a visceral charge.”—Publishers Weekly“McCarthy is fast revealing himself as a master craftsman who is steering the contemporary novel towards exciting territories.”—The Observer (London)“A confident and intelligent meditation on failed flights of transcendence.”—Times Literary SupplementAbout the AuthorTom McCarthy was born in 1969 and lives in London. He is known in the art world for the reports, manifestos, and media interventions he has made as General Secretary of the International Necronautical Society (INS), a semi-fictitious avant-garde network. His other books include C, Remainder, and Tintin and the Secret of Literature.