Tag / comic literary fiction

by Charles Holdefer

The Coast of Everything by Guillermo Stitch

The appeal of risk-averse storytelling is undeniable. “Cozy” refers to more than a subgenre of mystery writing: it can reflect a more general attitude, a reading posture that prizes the familiar, the safe, the fashionable. In effect, cheering for a team. A team can take many shapes: for instance, as fans of a particular genre, or as tenured specialists with a career to grind. Or as hipper-than-thou media opinionators who lay down the law for the rest of us. These line-ups are diverse, but they all share, despite their differences, a common suspicion of stories that upset expectations.

We could all do with a bit of soothing, I suppose, but we can also imagine other ways to play the game. Truly memorable books aspire to be more than non-allergenic toys. “Safety first” is not a precept for ambitious literature. Guillermo Stitch’s The Coast of Everything (Sagging Meniscus, 750 pages) can be described as a novel that is eager to push past guardrails. This is not the work of a team player, unless one imagines an altogether different kind of contest allowing an individual to play simultaneously on different, or even opposing, sides. Continue reading →

by VN Alexander

The Day Aunt Gina Came to Town by John Schoneboom

The Day Aunt Gina Came to Town (Round Fire Press, 200 pages) is not about the day Aunt Gina came to town; she only arrives on the last page. The story is about the fun that novelists have making things up, specifically inventing the backstories for characters and providing commentary on the thoughts that make characters seem interesting—even though their lives are in fact dull. The playful omniscient narrator makes this novel more than interesting. It’s fascinating, hysterical, and witty. Continue reading →

by U.R. Bowie

Herscht 07769 by László Krasznahorkai, translated by Ottilie Mulzet

[October 9, 2025, it was announced that László Krasznahorkai was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.] Here is a pertinent citation from Dennis Overbye (NY Times, 12/22/2024): “Everything that scientists have learned tells us that the universe is dynamic, and so is our knowledge of it. Nothing lasts forever, not even forever itself. Stars are born and they die, their ashes congeal in new generations of flash and crash. And so the show goes, until the last, biggest black hole gasps its last puff of subatomic vapor into the void.

“We don’t know what wonders await discovery back in the first nanosecond of time or in the yawning eons yet ahead. We don’t know why there is something instead of nothing at all. Or why God plays dice, as Einstein put it as he mulled the randomness implicit in quantum mechanics, the house rules of the subatomic realm.”

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by Charles Holdefer

Hope and Wild Panic by Sean Ennis

Some writers refuse to get in line with linearity, or take up common cause with causality. In Sean Ennis’s Hope and Wild Panic (Malarkey Books, 202 pages), the reader finds a depiction of life in the contemporary U.S. with recognizable settings and characters—realism, in a word—but it is also fundamentally destabilized, relying on non-chronological fragments (chapters? flash fictions?) of only one or two pages to explore the lives of a middle-aged narrator and his family. One section begins as follows:

“Rejoice with me, I have beaten psoriasis. There’s this trick I have of not watching the news. Most things don’t happen, and there’s been some debate internally about the order of events. I keep losing things and the obvious answer is that they’ve been stolen! But the investigation is finished—it is what it is. A black government helicopter is circling, and I’m just reading my big heavy book like that’s just a ceiling fan. Our neighbors behind the house, across the gulch, have been growing marijuana. I wonder what for. A family of foxes is our other neighbor. Is there some apophenia going on here? Doot-dee-doo.”

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by U.R. Bowie

Dead Souls by Sam Riviere

Believe the Blurbers

Dead Souls (A Novel by Sam Riviere, NY: Catapult, 2021, 289 pp.) is a rare example of a book containing believable blurbs. This wild gallimaufry of a novel, which runs a monologue through almost three hundred pages of text, without pauses for paragraphs or new chapters, is a tour de force of literary mania. Reviewers have pointed to possible influences: Roberto Bolaño, Georges Perec, Thomas Bernhard, Italo Calvino. One blurber, Nicolette Polek, describes the novel as “a rare and brilliant pleasure, a coiling, searing fugue of a book that takes our deranged culture and pulls forth from it a box of stars.” She’s right. Or, to put it in the fully neutered style in which the book is written, they are right.

There are chapters of sorts, but you have to figure them out yourself. In the front matter the author provides a kind of contents page—not labeled as such—listing names of characters as names of chapters, along with the pages where they start. Begin with an introductory chapter (not listed in these “contents”), then go, first, to “Zariyah Zhadan,” p. 32: this is, presumably, Chapter One. Proceed from there, filling in the chapter numbers beside the given name and page number. Chapter Six comprises two named characters. We end up with “The Scholastici,” p. 253, which is the last of twelve chapters. Continue reading →

by Dactyl Review

Maison Cristina by Eugene K. Garber

Where is Eugene K. Garber now? Some years ago he distinguished himself as a writer of dazzling short stories, many of them with an experimental edge. His Metaphysical Tales won the Associated Writing Programs annual prize for short stories, and a later work, The Historian, took the William Goyen Prize for fiction. Those two books, a dozen years apart, established Garber as an intellectual fabulist, a dazzling juggler of narrative devices, a witty and self-conscious artist with a subversive vision.

Joyce Carol Oates wrote a brief foreword to Metaphysical Tales which sounded more like a warning to readers than an introduction. After remarking on the author’s “extraordinary skill and vision” she wrote, “Garber is also stubborn, eccentric, self-conscious, and so willfully dazzling -– to be a virtuoso, or to be nothing! — that readers must be enjoined not to attempt to read this volume straight through, or even to read more than one story at a time.” And she concluded with, “Like all gifted writers, Eugene K. Garber is not to be understood – or loved – too quickly.” Clearly, that brainy Garber guy was some kind of card sharp, but with words. Continue reading →

by Dactyl Review

I Am Not Sidney Poitier by Percival Everett

“Once after dinner, as we sat in front of the television watching an Adventures of Superman rerun, I asked, ‘Was my father handsome?’

She replied, ‘Some might say yes.’

‘Was he smart?’ I asked.

She stared at the television. ‘Why is it that after all the bullets have bounced off Superman’s chest, he then ducks when the villain throws the empty gun at him?’

I looked at the television and wondered, knowing also that my quest for some detail about my history had been again thwarted, albeit with a very good question. I never pressed terribly hard, thinking that someday the story would surface, but then she died.”

I’ve quoted this out-of-context gem to give you a taste and because it made me laugh the first time I read this brilliant book  about a boy who is named “Not Sidney Poitier” although he is the spitting image of a young Poitier. I laughed while I moaned. This is serious and hilarious stuff.

However a year after my first reading, when I read this book for a second time, I had a different experience. I hardly laughed at all for the first half (second half is funnier). Instead I was moved by the pain. Continue reading →

by Brent Robison

Seven Cries of Delight by Tom Newton

Seven Cries of Delight  (Recital Publishing, 170 pages) is not like most collections of literary short stories. As legions of MFA students busily workshop their childhood drama into market-friendly “realistic” fiction, Tom Newton has clearly been following a different muse. These stories (two dozen of them!) range widely in setting and imagery and allusion, but all are hung on a solid spine: a lively curiosity about the deeper, invisible nature of what we call reality. This curiosity is expressed as speculative imaginings and unharnessed mental rovings, with an articulate, wryly humorous voice that obviously springs from a well-traveled and well-read intellect. At every turn are enjoyable discoveries of unlikely connections, unpredictable logic, and unanswerable questions.
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by VN Alexander

Alice and the Time Machine by Victor Fet

Victor Fet, a colleague with whom I have shared adventures in art and science, offers Alice and the Time Machine (Evertype, 134 pages, illustrated by Byron W. Sewell) on the 150 anniversary of the publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and the birth of H.G. Wells. The novella brings together Alice Liddell, Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll), John Dalton (of atomic theory fame), Charles Darwin, Francis Galton (Darwin’s half-cousin) and Wells, who arrives in Darwin’s time of 1862 from 1892 via a time machine. Together they determine that Alice’s mad tale is actually a message from the future, warning them of coming chaos, bloody wars, catastrophic pollution and tyranny. They form the Time Corps and use the time machine to contact scientists past and future to enlist their aid to try to change the world for the better. As they do their work, they notice changes in their own time. At the beginning of the tale, Wells is a nobody but becomes a famous science-fiction author while the other Wells fades in his memory as if a dream. Continue reading →

by VN Alexander

Isaac: A Modern Fable by Ivan G. Goldman

isaacHow should we suppose poor Isaac felt — son of a father all-too-willing to sacrifice him at the suggestion of some voice in his head? Christians are wont to overlook the obvious horror and absurdity of the Biblical tale. According to some (less awful) Jewish interpretations of events, it was perhaps Satan, as an agent of God, who spoke to Abraham, which would make more sense to those who imagine God to be not quite so sadistic.  Either way though, what kind of man would this traumatized son become?  In Isaac: A Modern Fable (Permanent, 223 pages), Ivan G. Goldman has arranged it so that Isaac, after the mishap at the altar, has been granted the gift of eternal youth. The identity of benefactor is not clear; the gift may be from Satan or from Jehovah. Isaac himself has never been able to decide, as his immortality and eternal youth often seem to him like a curse.

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