Since the publication of This Is Memorial Device in 2017, a fictional oral history of the post-punk scene in his native Airdrie, Keenan has become one of the most prolific and innovative literary stylists of the past five years, garnering favourable comparisons to David Foster Wallace and Alan Warner. Now he publishes an epochal epic that asks whether books are capable of dreaming, echoing Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 in terms of sheer ambition and scale. It goes on like this. Monument Maker is at least, well, original. Most contemporary fiction is insipid and formulaic; I’d rather read a confused novel like this one than something I’ve read hundreds of times before. So, Keenan deserves due credit for his ambition and fearlessness. But this doesn’t mean Monument Maker is a good book.

David Keenan has become one of the most prolific and innovative new literary stylists of the last five years . . . At this stage of his game Keenan can make his books do pretty much anything . . . Keenan's most ambitious and accomplished book yet. He has has built a monument, turning history to dust in the process, and delivering a hefty instalment of a literary career where literally anything is possible From there we move to Africa, to Edinburgh... and this is only the beginning. But it is clear from the start that, despite the great detail, Keenan is not primarily concerned with people or place. There’s something else going on. Keenan believes in God - “I’ve always been religious” - and he believes in Art. “I believe art can transform your life - it’s true because it transformed mine.” Of the ambition, intelligence and provocation of David Keenan’s mammoth Monument Maker there can be no doubt. Whether a majority of readers will enjoy the experience is another matter entirely. I ought to be the ideal reader: I admired his previous books, especially This Is Memorial Device and For the Good Times. Like his other work, this novel is avowedly experimental, pays homage to the avant garde, features science fiction and more than a little theology, and is riddled with puzzles. In some ways, especially in its obsession with paranoia, fascism, conspiracy and transgression, it can appear as a vast homage to Thomas Pynchon. With Shawn Fields' marvelous pen and ink sketches, Linda Booth Sweeney tells this story of a boy who grew up on a farm, then small towns in Massachusetts who became a famous sculptor whose work can be found in many places, foremost in our capitol. He didn't do well in school, loved being out in nature observing and drawing birds. The story shares that one time he carved a turnip into a frog and his parents noticed his talent as he discovered what he was going to do in his life. He did different studies in art. When the family moved to Concord, he took art lessons from May Alcott, Louisa May Alcott's sister. His first commission, at age twenty, was of the "Minuteman" leaving his plow, found now at The Old North Bridge. He went to Italy to study with a famous sculptor. Thus, he began this artist life.

Look for beauty, not ugliness. Look for goodness, not evil. Look for cheer, not trouble.--Dan Chester French

His tribute to the tall, gaunt, noble man who held America together when no one else could have was the crowning achievement of a boy who loved to make beautiful things. WENDY ERSKINE Prepare for a reading experience like no other. Visionary and prismatic, gloriously hallucinatory although grounded in the material, Monument Maker's grand sweep takes in distant historical subterrains, a shimmering summer of the present, the transient, the eternal, the profane, the divine. David Keenan is a blazing, deviant, fearless force and just a total one-off LENNY KAYE In a dizzying gyroscopic vortex of inner archeology, David Keenan sifts through spiraling past lives to unearth his provocative vision of the future. A colossus of imaginationIs it possible for books to read? For books to dream within books?’ David Keenan’s fifth novel attempts to answer this, through genres, and eras, and references to past work sure to please the avid Keenan reader. Monument Maker is a book within a book that spans hallucinatory historical epics through future-visioned histories of the world narrated by a British soldier made prophetic by depths of suffering. An epic written over 10 years, it’s a meditation on art and religion, and what it means to make a monument. Read two excerpts below. Daniel Chester French was son to a successful lawyer in the mid 1800's. As a child he struggled to discover what he was good at since he failed all his academic classes. He did, however, enjoy making things beautiful. He loved drawing, sculpting, carving, etc. Encouraged by his father and family, Daniel went on to further schooling and apprenticeships until he became known and requested for his sculpting skills. In 2666, Bolaño wrote that reading is as natural as thinking, praying, talking, walking, or listening to music. Stephen King contended that 2666 is a novel that cannot really be described but is best “experienced in all its crazed glory”. This also applies to Monument Maker, Keenan’s most ambitious and accomplished book yet. He has has built a monument, turning history to dust in the process, and delivering a hefty instalment of a literary career where literally anything is possible. Éamon Sweeney The IdeaBook’s collection of customized gravestones, monuments, and tombstone designs includes images that depict the most essential interests, beliefs, connections, and work to represent what departed loved ones were most passionate about. IdeaBook images feature themes that convey aspects deeply related to the history of the departed, including: Inset photographs. Pictures or illustrations of the departed, including individual, couple, family or group photographs.

I’m not interested in books with a point or a lesson. And I’m not interested in plots. Reading for me has always been about pleasure and awe. When I sat down to write it in2008, I had no idea what it was about.” Daniel Chester French, one of the most prolific and acclaimed American sculptors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is best known for his design of the monumental statue of Abraham Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial, Washington, DC. Linda Sweeney remedies that in this fascinating book the combines a biography of sculptor Daniel Chester French with an excellent explanation of the process of creating the memorial. She marries the two stories very well with interesting and informative writing. Sweeney tells both stories in language that will be easily understood by young readers and yet manages at the same time to craft both a complicated technical process and a real sense of this remarkable artist and his artistic journey. I really appreciated the introduction of the other artists who were involved in the monument.

Mary Paulson-Ellis was born in Glasgow and studied Politics and Sociology at Edinburgh University. She worked for several years in arts administration before giving it all up to become a writer. She began with an evening class as part of the Edinburgh … Funder reveals how O’Shaughnessy Blair self-effacingly supported Orwell intellectually, emotionally, medically and financially ... why didn’t Orwell do the same for his wife in her equally serious time of need?’

I began work on it in 2008 but stopped after a year. It started to worry about my mental health. I was losing who I was and wondering if David Keenan even existed. It was like looking into the abyss. I was suffering from a kind of psychos." Memorials also represent the endurance of the human spirit. They depict the nature and quality of the life they honor, the elements the departed held closest to their hearts and defined them to others. Yet the good parts of this book, the parts that are more meditation than narrative, are actually very good, whether they are dealing with pyramids or mortality, Chagall, Ouspensky, Bernini, Saint Anselm, Hans Frank or Arthur Rimbaud – all fleeting presences. Towards the end there is a wonderful cadenza on whether books dream and change while they are not being read. Overall, however, there is too much self-indulgence in Monument Maker. One character says: “I began to feel like a great writer, which is the only writer, the only one who had broken the silence, the only one who had dared to sacrifice his life to the mapping of this shape of consciousness.” Well, there need to be readers as well. FINANCIAL TIMES His visionary aesthetic reaches its grandest expression yet in his new novel, Monument Maker, a garrulous, gargantuan and ultimately elusive magnum opus Over the course of a hilarious chat about jewellery, collecting shoes and a tour of Basinski’s Los Angeles home, there was a palpable sense of two artists sharing a common attitude towards grief and humanity. In completely different ways, Basinski and Keenan commemorate lost souls by creating permanence in music and literature, one of the highest achievements of art.I liked it. I liked how he made that statue, how he sent them in pieces because I've never heard of that. I felt all the feelings [while reading]. I felt angry because of the war and sad that Lincoln died. Keenan makes his writing sound like spiritual visions expressed through acts of literary exorcism; William Blake meets Linda Blair. Such was his all consuming obsession with his book it put his mental health in danger.