Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction



"A hilarious, richly imagined bear's eye view of love, music, alienation, manhood and humanity…that recalls Pynchon at his most controlled." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

The hero of this sensational debut novel is an alto-sax virtuoso trying to evolve a personal style out of Coltrane and Rollins. He also happens to be a walking, talking, Blake- and Shakespeare-quoting bear whose musical, spiritual, and romantic adventures add up to perhaps the best novel, ursine or human, ever written about jazz.