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Literary synopsis

"Why I Go to the Movies Alone is a volume of interrelated texts which offers an intimate view of an urban world where the characters create images of each other and then the images have relationships. Some of it is about feeling like we're someone else...and about the threats and desires in actually believing we can even think about being someone other than who we already think we are. The scenes, connected by resonance rather than plot, flow from one to the next through three sections, Cowboys, Mountains, and Sunsets."

- From the publisher's catalogue.

Relation of the novel to the artist’s practice

"Why I Go to the Movies Alone charts the experience of people for whom the picture of life had come to seem more vital than the experience of life itself. It is broken into sections titled after his photographs of the time –Cowboys, Mountains, and Sunsets- and presents its characters not as pawns in some neatly braided plot, but as items in a collection. Nowadays, the book has all but disappeared from circulation and lives on mainly as an entry in Prince’s bibliography, a title in a list, a reputed and rare object that few have seen. Like everything in Prince’s world, it now inhabits “a space that had the chance of looking real, but a place that didn’t have any specific chance of being real"."

- Susan Tallman