An obituarist opens his archive to celebrate the obscure and the eccentric.
Dannatt terminates this volume with his own putative extinction, performing the difficult if not dangerous task of penning his personal life history and ultimate end..
Here are arranged an almost fictive cast of characters including an imaginary Sephardic count in Wisconsin, a sadomasochist collector of the world\'s rarest clocks, a discrete Cuban connoisseur of invisibility, an alcoholic novelist in Rio, a Warhol Superstar gone wrong, a leading downtown Manhattan dominatrix, a conceptual artist who blew up a museum, and many others.
This book is a selection of some of the best--meaning most improbable--of these miniature biographies.
Dannatt maintained a veritable lust, perverse certainly, for capturing and celebrating such wayward existences.
His specialty, much in demand among even the most mainstream publications, was to memorialize those whose eccentricity or criminality made them unlikely candidates for the fleeting immortality of a newspaper necrology.
For many decades Adrian Dannatt tracked and dredged the dead, with a macabre disregard for the etiquette of mortality.
In Doomed and Famous , an obituarist opens his archive in celebration of the most marginal and improbable characters, creating a meta-fiction of extinction and obscurity.
An obituarist opens his archive to celebrate the obscure and the eccentric
