Description
Fiction. STORY BOOK envisions a new wave of storytelling through a series of canny narratives that swarm around the blurred edges of being. In a twisting of genres, STORY BOOK confronts the complexities of loss and the violence of memory. Haunting and strange, STORY BOOK obeys the rule in which our story is never finished.
"STORY BOOK is powered by its insistence on what could be or what one could do, a bare could boiling up from its cold, existential cauldron into something exceedingly human. You could 1) die in a hermit's cave or 2) beat a stranger in your kitchen before dawn or 3) give a speech on the ecology of cannibalism. In Piccinnini's land of Could, everything is destined to start over, and with each chapter's recapitulation the reader is brought deeper into the act of eavesdropping, an ear to the universe as it compulsively begins again. It feels like reading bits of news on another planet through a wormhole over a stranger's shoulder. It's strange, and captivating, and you could go on reading it forever—if only it lasted that long."—Chris Martin
"In this book a series of delicately rendered stories begin—and, then, continually begin. If one imagines the strange happiness of first glancing at a watercolor image depicting the transformation of a person into an animal or monster, plant or object, that initial pleasurable confusion at what it is we see STORY BOOK returns us again and again to this region of (uneasy) excitement and exciting unease."—Lucy Ives
"STORY BOOK invites you into the opening pages of more than a dozen tales as violent and haunting as anything in Grimms. Again and again, and with a queasy intimacy, Piccinnini puts his readers directly in touch with the way of all flesh, the tendency of bodies to sour, rot, rip, stiffen, and decay. In doing so, he creates a lyricism of unrest and violence unlike anything in American fiction."—Chris Hosea
"STORY BOOK suspends and electrifies narration mid-creation."—Rita Banerjee, Los Angeles Review of Books
"STORY BOOK shows us how the poet's conception of a text as self-sustaining can inform the genre of the novel or novella. Like different sections of a long poem, these chapters form a mosaic that suggests new ways of thinking about thinking about the world and writing."—Stephan Delbos, BODY
Author Bio
Douglas Piccinnini is the author of several chapbooks including Soft (The Cultural Society), CRYSTAL HARD-ON (Minutes Books), FLAG (Well Greased Press), and ∆ (Tea Party Republicans Press) with Cynthia Gray & Camilo Roldán. His writing has appeared in Antioch Review, Diner Journal, Lana Turner, NYTimes.com, The Poetry Project Newsletter and The Volta, among other publications. STORY BOOK is his first novella. He is also the author of the forthcoming collection of poems, Blood Oboe (Omnidawn).
Author City: LAMBERTVILLE, NJ USA