I’m a novelist and admire writing that pushes against the conventions of mainstream fiction, that goes around and beyond the formulaic, commercial concept of plot. In the Western world, we’re especially stuck on what film director Raul Ruiz calls “conflict theory”—the masculinist idea that only conflict can create narrative. Of course conflict is part of life, but hello—there’s more. Conventional plot’s well-worn heroes, helpers, villians, saviours, and conflict-based climax, so closely tied to Hollywood USA, are predictable and unfulfilling. Many people seek something more innovative, like the literary versions of Philip Glass or Fernando Botero.
A comic, modern-day fable featuring an ingenue who’s nearly middle-aged and refuses to stop riding her bicycle. Every sentence of this novel seems to sneak open the strangeness of reality. Frances’ hometown, Munson, absurd little burg, is full of people who want Frances to change altogether. With understated humor, the book spoofs pulp romance novels of past eras with its ultra-innocent dialogue; it also focuses on human power dynamics, and the way we often give up our power even when no one’s trying to take it from us. Frances’ quest to free herself from Munson’s pressure does not cohere to standard plot rules. Instead, inventive prose, little softnesses, the town’s bizarre array of characters, and comical, stilted dialogue come forward.
I revere writing that doesn't cling to the ridiculously sacrosanct principle that conflict is essential to stories—especially conflict between good and evil. If any writer’s work completely sidesteps the convention of plot, it’s Lutz, who also publishes under the name Garielle Lutz. These voice-driven stories—of nameless folk seeking small comforts where they can find them—are nearly undescribable. Stomach-dropping little language surprises abound, and Lutz has a penchant for preserving American English heirloom words and phrases such as “Car-coat,” “shoehorn,” and “frankfurter shack". Many of the stories describe transient, uneasy relationships, yet laugh-out-loud humor is present, too. Some of the stories seem less to move forward narratively than to rock to and fro. Those interested in pure language-forward narratives by a master of sentences should read Lutz.
Even as a chapbook, it was one of Time Out New York’s Ten Best Books of 2007, and now we're proud to publish an expanded paperback edition of Partial List of People to Bleach, with six previously uncollected pieces, including the provocative and now-classic essay “The Sentence Is a Lonely Place,” and a foreword by Gordon Lish.
"Partial List of People to Bleach is at once cruelly honest, precisely painful, and beautifully rendered." —Brian Evenson
"Gary Lutz is a master—living proof that, even in our cliché-ridden, denial-drenched, hype-driven age, true originality is still an American possibility." —George Saunders
Just like life, this supple narrative about a village in Warwickshire, England is full of beauty, gruesomeness, and sudden death. Without manifest plot points as such, the narrative seems to float past the range of eccentric townspeople after a destructive flood and later an epidemic of poisonings. Comically, none of the characters seem to take that death seriously. Comyns’ tender gift for describing humans in intimate communion with nature will make you long for flowers, forests, and abounding nature-amid-towns which we no longer experience in today’s world. This writer is neither optimistic nor pessimistic about humanity--but observationally brilliant. In their wild, hilarious ranges of behaviors, her characters too are lovely specimens living at the marshy banks of an omnipresent river.
“Comyns’ novel is deranged in ways that shouldn’t be disclosed.” —Ben Marcus
This is the story of the Willoweed family and the English village in which they live. It begins mid-flood, ducks swimming in the drawing-room windows, “quacking their approval” as they sail around the room. “What about my rose beds?” demands Grandmother Willoweed. Her son shouts down her ear-trumpet that the garden is submerged, dead animals everywhere, she will be lucky to get a bunch. Then the miller drowns himself . . . then the butcher slits his throat . . . and a series of gruesome deaths plagues…
Decades before the TV series Grimm, Angela Carter rewrote Grimm’s and other classic European fairy tales with a feminist bent, heightening the sexuality just under the surface of the original tales. Even more exciting, this collection is sentence-forward, meaning that the dazzling, tumbling-long, and flawless sentences are front and center in this gifted author’s work.
The content is strong and includes a retelling of the Bluebeard tale with a grotesque patriarch forbidding his young bride to enter a locked room. In Carter’s version, the old pervert never gets a chance to murder his curious wife. Another story describes fetishistic, depraved customs in an isolated village so unnervingly that your view of forests will permanantly shift. Carter’s short stories have been heralded by literary writers for years as a precious secret.
With an introduction by Helen Simpson. From familiar fairy tales and legends - Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard, Puss in Boots, Beauty and the Beast, vampires and werewolves - Angela Carter has created an absorbing collection of dark, sensual, fantastic stories.
A mysterious, melancholy narrative translated from French is rendered in stripped-down sentences, following a novelist, Mia, after a death in the family. The subsequent plot of subterfuge and corporate crime is so full and busy with knotty, overly complex occurrences that it begins to seem a deliberate distortion and exaggeration of the convention of plot itself. Through the character of Mia, the gifted Redonnet reports tragic and powerful occurrences in flat, clear prose that packs emotion just under the surface of the affectless sentences. The word “Candy” recurs hauntingly through the novel: as a song title, as the name of a character in a show, and as the name that Mia’s lovers call her. This slight novel leaves searing traces of emotional impact long after you read it.
Candy Story recounts a turbulent year in the life of Mia, a young woman whose apparent calm is perpetually threatened by inner doubts and outer catastrophe. Her modest dreams of happiness are dashed by the deaths of her mother, old friends, and her lover. Mia is a talented writer, the author of an autobiographical novel. Now, assailed by calamity and misfortune, she struggles with writer's block, confounded-at least for the moment-by the senseless world around her. Candy Story is the fourth novel by Marie Redonnet. Translations of the first three-Hotel Splendid, Forever Valley, and Rose Mellie Rose-are also available from…
Constructed nonlinearly, this funny, playful, and complex novel concerns our culture’s pressure on men to “be” something; it’s also about the human sense of self in general. It has no conventional plot, though Kalich has created a perfectly workable structure: a kind of index that builds in intensity. Without giving particulars as to geography, age, family, or employment, the paragraph-length descriptions of Charlie P reveal him as hyperbolically great or defeated. Charlie P has accomplished both everything and nothing.
The character is an iconographic blank, perhaps an engineer or former bitcoin-seeker who, for all his striving, suffers an inability to engage with the world; perversely, he views that as “giving in.” It’s no understatement to say that readers of Charlie P, sometime in their lives, will have met a Charlie P.
“Charlie P is energetic, delightfully sardonic, dark without being oppressive, playful and very readable.”—Sven Birkerts
In Charlie P, New York author Richard Kalich offers us a singularly unique, comic, and outlandish everyman. Akin to other great American icons such as Sinclair Lewis’ Babbitt and Ring Lardner’s Al, Charlie P plumbs the relation between fantasy and reality to offer us a character both asocial and alienated and, at the same time, at the heart of the American dream.
I became fascinated with 16th-century and 17th-century Europe after reading Don Quixote many years ago. Since then, every novel or nonfiction book about that era has felt both ancient and contemporary. I’m always struck by how much our environment has changed—transportation, communication, housing, government—but also how little we as people have changed when it comes to ambition, love, grief, and greed. I doubled down my reading on that time period when I researched my novel, Dulcinea. Many people read in the eras of the Renaissance, World War II, or ancient Greece, so I’m hoping to introduce them to the Baroque Age.
Dolça Llull Prat, a wealthy Barcelona woman, is only 15 when she falls in love with an impoverished poet-solder. Theirs is a forbidden relationship, one that overcomes many obstacles until the fledgling writer renders her as the lowly Dulcinea in his bestseller.
By doing so, he unwittingly exposes his muse to gossip. But when Dolça receives his deathbed note asking to see her, she races across Spain with the intention of unburdening herself of an old secret.
On the journey, she encounters bandits, the Inquisition, illness, and the choices she's made. At its heart, Dulcinea is about how we betray the people we love, what happens when we succumb to convention, and why we squander the few chances we get to change our lives.
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