"If Duchamp or maybe Magritte wrote a novel (and maybe they did. Did they?) it might look something like this remarkable little book of Padgett Powell's."

--Richard Ford

The Interrogative Mood is a wildly inventive, jazzy meditation on life and language by the novelist that Ian Frazier hails as "one of the best writers in America, and one of the funniest, too." A novel composed entirely of questions, it is perhaps the most audacious literary high-wire act since Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine or David Foster Wallace's stories; a playful and profound book that, as Jonathan Safran Foer says, "will sear the unlucky volumes shelved on either side of it. How it doesn't, itself, combust in flames is a mystery to me."

Playful and profound, The Interrogative Mood is a bebop solo of a book in which every sentence is a question. In it acclaimed novelist Padgett Powell--a writer once touted as the best of his generation by Saul Bellow--force us to consider our core beliefs, our most cherished memories, our final views on life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. In fictionas in life, there may be no easy answers--but The Interrogative Mood is an exuberant book that leaves the reader feeling more alive.

Powell, Padgett

Padgett Powell is the author of six novels, including Edisto, which was nominated for the National Book Award, and two collections of stories. His writing has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper's, and the Paris Review, as well as in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Sports Writing. He has received a Whiting Writers' Award, the Rome Fellowship in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. He lives in Gainesville, Florida, where he teaches at MFA@FLA, the writing program of the University of Florida.