During their privileged, eccentric English childhood, Jack Rathbone enjoyed the unstinting adoration of his sister, Gin. So when both are art students in London, it is wrenching for her to watch him fall under the spell of Vera Savage, a flamboyant and reckless painter from Glasgow. Jack and Vera run off to New York City within weeks of meeting, and from a bruised, bereft distance Gin follows their progress south through Miami and pre-revolutionary Havana to Port Mungo, a seedy town in the mangrove swamps of Honduras. There, in an old banana warehouse, Jack obsessively devotes himself to his canvases while Vera succumbs to a chronic restlessness that not even the birth of two daughters can subdue. Passion, narcissism, and the relentless demands of creativity hold these riveting characters in thrall, and McGrath skilfully evokes a feverish world of tropical impulses and artistic ambition that leads ultimately to dark secrets and to death.

Following the publication of Ghost Town (2005), a complex, globally conscious genealogy of millennial Manhattan, McGrath’s transnational status as an English author resident in New York, his pointed manipulation of British and American contexts, and his clear apprehension of imperial legacies have all come into sharper focus. By bringing together readings cognizant of this transnational and historical sensitivity with those that build on existing studies of McGrath’s engagements with the gothic and madness, Patrick McGrath and his Worlds sheds new light on an author whose imagined realities reflect the anxieties, pathologies, and power dynamics of our contemporary world order. McGrath’s fiction has been noted as parodic (The Grotesque, 1989), psychologically disturbing (Spider, 1990), and darkly sexual (Asylum, 1996). Throughout, his corpus is characterized by a preoccupation with madness and its institutions and by a nuanced relationship to the gothic. With its international range of contributors, and including a new interview with McGrath himself, this book opens up hitherto underexplored theoretical perspectives on the key concerns of McGrath’s ouevre, moving conversations around McGrath’s work decisively forward. Offering the first sustained exploration of his fiction’s transnational and world-historical dimensions, Patrick McGrath and his Worlds seeks to situate, reflect upon, and interrogate McGrath’s role as a key voice in Anglophone letters in our millennial global moment.

This book is the first collected volume to be entirely dedicated to the work of contemporary Anglo-American writer Patrick McGrath. It follows the international conference that was held in his presence at Perpignan University, France, in May 2011. It comprises nine chapters (as well as an introduction and an index) written by scholars specializing in Gothic and American literature, each dealing with specific aspects of McGrath’s work. The volume seeks to encompass the author’s whole literary production to date, spanning a 25-year writing career. It also features an exclusive afterword written by the author himself, who attended all the papers given during the conference with great attention and often intensely enthusiastic reactivity. The editor’s intention is twofold. The idea was first to provide a comprehensive survey of Patrick McGrath’s writing, returning to the aspects that are usually associated with the author’s work, such as his artful narrative control, his inclination for stories of “transgression and decay”, as well as his long-lasting reflexive relationship with the Gothic and the Grotesque. Yet the aim of this volume is also to open new directions for the study of McGrath’s texts, taking into account the noticeable evolution of the writer’s literary production, its growing Americanization and gradual distanciation with modes of excess. It seems that it is no longer possible to tag McGrath’s work as neo- or ‘postmodern’ Gothic. His books’ growing complexity and change of horizons call for fresh investigations. This book will be of interest to students of McGrath’s work, scholars of the Gothic and its contemporary manifestations, as well as to all academics specializing in contemporary American fiction.