Monument Maker

Product Information

Keenan says, “I think literature should show us how spectacular, miraculous and unique existence is. I wanted to thank God for the moment, for the miracle of life. So many books these days are just dreary critiques. I wanted a book that said YES! A book that was grateful to the glory of beauty and love and art.” Inset photographs. Pictures or illustrations of the departed, including individual, couple, family or group photographs. This book tells the story of Dan French who was the sculptor that created the Lincoln Memorial. The book starts with Dan as a small child and how he struggles to find what he wants to do growing up. When he finally discovers his love for art and sculpting he begins studying different styles and artists to help him grow his talent. The book also talks about how the Lincoln Memorial was created. At the end of the book, there is a timeline and other resources about Dan French. Patten’s IdeaBook offers a nearly limitless number of artistic combinations for you and your family to consider for your loved one’s custom mausoleum, gravestone or memorial. Its goal is to help you create a compelling, lasting image that perfectly captures the life and memories of the departed. Custom Headstones for Generations of Memories

Monuments are symbols of endurance in more ways than one. They’re constructed to withstand through multiple generations and centuries, always there for the visits of loved ones, friends, even strangers. Patten’s IdeaBook helps visitors conceive the ideal, everlasting monument to the deceased family member, loved ones and friends. With an expansive array of styles, designs, images and placement options, the IdeaBook gives you the chance to try several memorial combinations until you find the perfect arrangement.Standard monuments. Traditional and vintage grave marker designs as seen in cemeteries all over the world, in a wide range of alternative shapes and cuts. FINANCIAL TIMES His visionary aesthetic reaches its grandest expression yet in his new novel, Monument Maker, a garrulous, gargantuan and ultimately elusive magnum opus Flat or beveled markers. Simple stones that are positioned flush to the grass with messaging on top.

There are so many things I have been thinking about since finishing Monument Maker, and one of them is how important art and artists are to David Keenan and his writings. In both of the novels I have read by him, he has focused on an obscure artist and the people who surround these artists and worship them, turning their following into a small cult. This group, sometimes 20 or 30 people worldwide, are devoted to these artists, even when these said artists really have not released a massive amount of work, sometimes just one obscure book. In Keenans’ world, if someone writes a slim novella or someone paints a few canvases, there is a potential that a group of people will follow this artist, try to learn everything about them, and will obsess over every move that the artist makes. This devotion to the artist, regardless of obscurity, seems to be one of those things that Keenan likes to fantasize about, like how every single little piece of art has the potential to make someone a devout to the artist and his life. This exhibits a sincerity to the value of art in David Keenan’s life, otherwise this phenomenon would not continue to be a major plot in his novels. 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-offI found this book on the 2020 list of Notable Social Studies Trade Books for Young People. This book was named 2020 Bank Street Best Children’s Book of the Year. I read this digitally on Epic and was able to see the illustrations very well. The IdeaBook lets you choose custom gravestones from a broad range of styles. For each memorial you choose, you can enter text, images, and information that best represent the life you’re commemorating. Patten’s IdeaBook gives you the chance to visualize an infinite number of possibilities for creating the perfect memorial, and lets you save as many custom combinations as you wish. Styles of Custom Monuments and Headstones Engravings of musical instruments, including guitar, piano, harmonica, brass instruments, and others, as well as musical symbols or notation. For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial. 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

But even that’s inadequate. Asking what this novel is about is the wrong question. A better one is: why did Keenan dedicate his book “To the glory of God”? The prose often reads like a stream of consciousness with a dreamlike quality that can be deceptive, and Keenan’s uncommon way with grammar and punctuation are an important part of the process. Great care has clearly been taken with every single comma and clause as it takes great skill to make writing seem this effortless. David Keenan is pushing boundaries and pushing readers, but no more than he does himself. A towering achievement. A book within a book within a book, a meditation on art and religion, and on what it means to make monuments. A hallucinatory epic and a forward-looking history of the world, Monument Maker was written over the course of ten years and represents the apex of Keenan’s project to create books that are themselves teeming with organic life. Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial?Rustic and boulder. Headstones cut to have a “natural,” rough finish around the edges, resembling stone or a boulder.

These are some of the questions posed by David Keenan's masterly fifth novel, Monument Maker, an epic romance of eternal summer and a descent, into history, into the horrors of the past; a novel with a sweep and range that runs from the siege of Khartoum and the conquest of Africa in the 19th century through the Second World War and up to the present day, where the memory of a single summer, and a love affair that took place across the cathedrals of Ile de France, unravels, as a secret initiatory cult is uncovered that has its roots in macabre experiments in cryptozoology in pre-war Europe. So many of us have been fortunate enough to visit the Lincoln Memorial and be awed by the moving sculpture of Lincoln. But how many of us know anything about either the sculptor or the other extraordinary artists who created the memorial? 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: French lived in amazing times. (He also carved a figurine of lovely-dovey owls that I am all about.) The events that took place in his lifetime, his name-drop-worthy neighbors (May Alcott! Ralph Waldo Emerson!), the people who mentored his tremendous vision--what a remarkable existence.I intend that this book should be as a mausoleum for the two of us, and the state of our bodies, guesswork, now, buried, still entwined in each other, our very bones confused, our skulls fused in some unimaginable cataclysmic attempt at ultimate union, which is what sculpture is, which is what these language marks, carved into white by a pressure in my brain that I know can only find release in the idea of being caught up in something eternal …”