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Joshua Cody was about to receive his PhD from Columbia University when he was diagnosed with cancer. He underwent six months of chemotherapy. The treatment failed. Expectations for survival plummeted. After consulting with several oncologists, he embarked on a risky course of high-dose chemotherapy, full body radiation, and an autologous bone marrow transplant. In a fevered, mesmerising voice, Joshua chronicles his battle against cancer with breathtaking audacity. Slaloming effortlessly between references to Ezra Pound, The Rolling Stones, Beethoven, and even Brett Favre, Joshua takes readers through his struggle in a memoir unlike any other. He captures the rage that can often accompany illness and the paradoxical will towards self-destruction. To wit, midway through his chemotherapy treatment, he leaves the hospital, goes to his regular bar, does cocaine in the bathroom, then meets a woman on the street and brings her home. With writing that is as fresh and beguiling as it is brave and revealing, Joshua Cody has created a book that gives readers a long glimpse into a gorgeous, dark thrashing in the forecourt of death. Literary, hallucinatory and at times uncomfortable reading, [sic] is ultimately a celebration of art, language and life.

About the Author :
Joshua Cody received his bachelor's degree in music composition from Northwestern University, and his master's and doctoral degrees from Columbia University. Joshua is a composer living in New York City. This is his first book.

Review :
‘Writing this rawly self-conscious has no business captivating you, let alone moving you. That it manages to do it anyway is a testament to Mr. Cody's talent, honesty, and singularity' ‘To open this book is to engage with a spirit at once endlessly curious, genuinely funny, fiercely intelligent, and wonderfully perverse. Reading it I kept having the uncanny sense that I was holding something alive in my hands, something with a pulse. This book is a true gift, a wild ride, and a tour-de-force performance. Welcome to the new face of memoir' ‘There are paragraphs of Mr. Cody's testimony so brimming with the connectedness of things - art and life, wellness and death, sex and sickness, beauty and disease, literature and love, music and mortality: all the undulant contingencies - it takes our breath away. Mighty writing and a memorable read' 'From its brilliant title onwards, persuasively equates that which is with that which is diseased. Joshua Cody is sympathetic (in all senses of the word), immensely knowledgeable, and he makes illuminating connections when discussing major modernist figures such as Nietzsche, Kakfa, Klee, Pound and Eliot'