Of these stories, portraits “of many selves,” the author writes: “In Hokusai’s One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji, sometimes you see the mountain, sometimes you don’t, depending on where you are standing. Like mountains, these self portraits too may be visible or invisible—or sometimes positioned at the edge of the picture. And, like mountains, they are meant to be experienced not understood.”
Notices
“[M]ind-twisting adventures…. The author displays a sharp, edgy sense of humor in his explorations of the human condition, with all its attendant foibles, quirky relationships, and bizarre affectations. The collection is best for readers who are able to let go of the constraints of logic and enjoy a heady freefall through an entertaining house of mirrors. Creative, unsettling, funny, and challenging.”
“There is a particular pleasure in being confused by a short story collection. Not frustrated or lost, exactly, but left with the sense that something happened to you that you cannot quite explain. P.J. Blumenthal’s Self Portraits embraces that feeling from the beginning…. Blumenthal’s stories are strange, funny, intimate, surreal, philosophical, and occasionally absurd, often all within the same collection and sometimes within the same story…. [Their] premises sound like the beginning of puzzles, but Blumenthal is less interested in solving them than in exploring what it feels like to encounter them…. Reading Self Portraits can feel like wandering through an exhibition where some rooms seem to have doors connecting them, even if you can never quite find those doors.”
—Allison Renner, in MicroLit
P.J. Blumenthal is an American writer living in Munich, Germany. He is the author of a nonfiction book on feral man, Kaspar Hausers Geschwister (Kaspar Hauser’s Siblings), as well as a German-language blog, “Der Sprachbloggeur.” Three volumes of his poetry have appeared in the USA so far: A Lusty Romance, Poems for Readers and Slow Train to Cincinnati.