Fiction. Gad Holander's WALSERIAN WALTZES is a sequence of meditations on madness, writing, death, and identity. Focusing on a character split between the first-person singular pronoun and his own name -- a character who may or may not be dead and may or may not be insane, a character whose goal is to become a 'self-made failure' -- Hollander skillfully leads us to contemplate the paradoxical trajectories of language, the subjective and objective worlds it seems to create and destroy. Anyone looking for fiction that combines the compressed and elusive qualities of poetry with the abstract resonance of philosophy will find WALSERIAN WALTZES a richly satisfying experience -- Stephen-Paul Martin.