{"product_id":"9781555979799","title":"The Complete Ballet: A Fictional Essay in Five Acts","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eA dark-hued, hybrid novel by a writer who “delivers our culture back to us, made entirely new” (A. M. Homes)\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn \u003ci\u003eThe Complete Ballet\u003c\/i\u003e, John Haskell choreographs an intricate and irresistible pas de deux in  which fiction and criticism come together to create a new kind of  story. Fueled by the dramatic retelling of five romantic ballets, and interwoven with a contemporary story about a man whose daunting  gambling debt pushes him to the edge of his own abyss, it is both a  pulpy entertainment and a meditation on the physicality—and  psychology—of dance.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe unnamed narrator finds himself  inexorably drawn back to the pre–cell phone world of Technicolor Los  Angeles, to a time when the tragedies of his life were about to collide.  Working as a part-time masseur in Hollywood, he attends an underground  poker game with his friend Cosmo, a strip-club entrepreneur. What  happens there hurtles the narrator down the road and into the room where  the novel’s violent and surreal showdown leaves him a different person.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAs the narrator revisits his past, he simultaneously inhabits and  reconstructs the mythic stories of ballet, assessing along the way the  lives and obsessions of Nijinsky and Balanchine, Pavlova and Fonteyn,  Joseph Cornell and the story’s presiding spirit, the film director John  Cassavetes. This compulsively readable fiction is ultimately a profound  and haunting consideration of the nature of art and identity.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Graywolf Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47128609292528,"sku":"9781555979799","price":9.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9781555979799_p0.jpg?v=1763755451","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9781555979799","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}