Jaded and adrift, a young painter in New York joins his fate to a mercurial titan of industry in the hopes of finding a new artistic form—and quite possibly a new life. Cutting-edge intoxicants, the vagaries of desire, and an obscure art magazine with unlimited ambitions collide on the ultimate stage, where only delusion can ease the chase of mystique. In an epic new novel ranging across acting, advertising, professional sports, and the city, Mark de Silva offers up a grand meditation on the bitter glories of 21st century being, the human impulse to search for something original in the cacophony of a continuously replicating world, and the self-revelations living in our perception of others. The Logos is a sweeping and intimate inquiry into all things New York, and now.

The Logos, Advance Comments

“Bidding to join the company of the postmodern titans who dominated late-20th-century American fiction: Gaddis, Gass, DeLillo, Wallace… A hefty old-school social novel.”

―Kirkus Reviews

“In this provocative epic of ideas from de Silva…the result is an original, formidable portrayal of American commerce, where everything—including one’s vision—can be bought and sold.”

―Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

“Mark de Silva is high among the remnant few whose writing still justifies the writing of novels. He has earned this distinction by treating the novel not as a form but as a formative laguaging of the world that spins and tilts beneath the reader.”

―Joshua Cohen, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of The Netanyahus

“The Logos is an intellectual novel not subject to intellectual clichés; a psychological novel not determined by psychological theories; a complex novel of characters not restricted to characters’ beliefs; and a masterful depiction of the search for an intellectual life not determined by intellectuality, in a time when the intellect has stopped being commonly understood as essential for social life—or even survival.”

―Germán Sierra, author of The Artifact

“The Logos is a seance, a conjuring of unbodily plasmas, blackbox TV metaphysics for the word-made-without-commentary. Flaring outward from a collective dreamwork into the shape of things to come, The Logos is autoluminescent realism transacted at godspeed, in Panavision. Its truth is the obsequious banality of an infinite soap opera, reeling out the testaments, loop-ing and branching through countless subplots, ad-breaks, sales pitches, product placements, only to lead inevitably back to that perennial cave, Platonistic cinematheque— its resident mirror-gang armed with oxygen masks and image duplicators, waiting on the far side of the psychic screen for you, the literal voyeur, to summon them.”

―Louis Armand, author of The Combinations

“Mark de Silva's The Logos stands with some of the best novels of the century: The Known World, Middle C, and A Naked Singularity. It's a dark mountain with vertiginous switchbacks-it quests to ask why we "love" those who use us, those who feast on our souls.”

―Greg Gerke, author of See What I See

Mark de Silva is the author of the novel Square Wave and the fiction editor of 3:AM Magazine. He holds degrees in philosophy from Brown (AB) and Cambridge (PhD).

ISBN: 9781955904223