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Author and critic Michael Antman joins Joe and Mark for a wide-ranging discussion about visual arts and writing.
Michael started out as a poet. After switching to fiction, he’s had two novels published by indie presses: Cherry Whip and Everything Solid Has A Shadow. He likes to explore themes of self-knowledge in his work, or, more accurately, “the lack of self-knowledge.”
In addition to writing, Michael had a successful career in marketing at a Fortune 100 company, doing mostly business-to-business marketing. “Book marketing is a different animal,” he says. The three talk about what they’ve experienced trying to sell their own work, and Michael acknowledges the difficulty in getting people to read novels about insight and what happens in our unconscious.
At the age of twelve, visiting the Art Institute of Chicago, Michael first encountered the work of René Magritte. “It blew the top of my head off!” he relates.
The best surrealism combines common elements of the world with the feelings we have inside our dreams. Surrealism is unexpected but never absurd, Michael says. “It makes tremendous psychological sense at a deep level.”
The experience at the Art Institute of Chicago awakened something in Michael, made him start looking at the world in unusual ways. When he was a little older, 2001: A Space Odyssey also had a huge impact on him as an artist.
Eventually, the conversation moves into truly astonishing dream territory. It’s not to be missed!
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Michael Antman is the author of the novel Cherry Whip, Everything Solid Has a Shadow, and the forthcoming memoir Searching for the Seagull Motel. He is a two-time finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Balakian Award for Excellence in Book Reviewing. He is also a theatre critic, urban photographer and poet, and formerly the Global Head of Marketing for a Fortune 500 company.
Everything Solid Has a Shadow is a novel about “one man’s soul-searching journey to unearth the mysteries of his past and his present (that) unfolds like a hauntingly beautiful dream from which you won’t want to wake.” –Randy Richardson, President, Chicago Writers Association.)
This poetic story of dreams, deception, coming to terms with past mysteries and present traumas, and learning what love means is “deeply touching” (Philadelphia Inquirer), “emotionally satisfying” (Kirkus Reviews), “a page-turner that also engages the reader in deep metaphysical exploration” (Building the Perfect Chicago Book Collection), and “a literary joy” (Readers’ Favorite Five Star review.)
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