Nervous System: The Story of a Novelist Who Lost His Mind

Description

A few months after selling his first book to a major publisher, Jan Lars Jensen woke in a psychiatric ward, only to find that the ideas that had inspired his fiction now roamed through his waking nightmares. Gripping and harrowing, darkly comic and deeply moving, Nervous System is the memoir of a novelist who almost let his imagination get the best of him.

Jan Lars Jensen had his first novel, Shiva 300, listed in the Guardia as one of the top ten fantasy novels of all time. He lives in Halifax, Canada, and online at www.jensen.ca.

"'As a brave, unflinching look at mental illness, Nervous System is revelatory; as a candid, conflicted view of the creative process, it is a revelation.' Vancouver Sun 'A weird and brilliant memoir... Jensen's writing is smooth and elegant, his narrative suspenseful, his sensibility witty... he delivers a smart and sympathetic narrator - himself - whose personal adventure, as terrifying as any in the thriller rack at the drug store, captures the catastrophes of the present, the ones lurking much closer to home.' Toronto Star 'Nervous System is not just a compelling memoir, it's an important one. Mental illness manages to be both glamorized and stigmatized in our culture. What is often missed is what Jensen shows us convincingly: the moment-to-moment unhappiness of losing your mind... Both harrowingly authentic and poignantly understated. This is, if we're lucky, as close as most of us will get to going really crazy.' National Post 'Candid, merciless, funny, horrific, insightful - often all at once.' Locus"