News

“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

“Tangibly and compellingly, with equal attention to the dynamics of plot and character, Stitch’s narrative moves, for the most part, with the fine propellant of a protagonist under pressure (several of them, in fact). It’s also absolutely packed with satisfying sentences, sentences of the sort to (as William Gass once put it) ‘make an imaginary speaker speak the imagination loudly to the reading eye.’…. Far from the false front of magisterial prose that so many otherwise hollow books commit the sin of presenting, the generally high watermark of a style marked by balance, rhythm, variation, and lucidity shows up on virtually every page of this book—no small task considering how many pages that is….

“While most novels move toward a single conclusion, this one moves toward no fewer than five…. Even the most squarely nested narratives refuse to remain contained; they peck through the shells designed to enclose them. Look no further than the impulses that gave birth to each of the book’s sections. Whether it’s quenching boredom, subverting authority, exercising the imagination, or capturing the past, most stories can’t help but outgrow their original purpose….

“We finish with Stitch, whose conclusion—the conclusion of all conclusions—feels well earned. ‘Endings are terrifying,’ he writes. ‘But beautiful. They make a story of what came before.’ The Coast of Everything is extraordinary, a toweringly ambitious novel that, despite its flaws, restores its readers’ faith in the messy business of literature that strives to last.”

—Eric Bies, in Metropolitan Review

“One of the highlights of Crux is the intellectual engagement with each perspective and the reasoning that fuels the characters’ outlook, even as they change their opinions in response to debate and the deteriorating health of Bobby Sands. No one person or belief is given credence or importance over another…. Crux stands as an original and beautiful rendering of Ireland amongst post-colonialist narratives, embracing nuance and empathy at a time when reactionary views are becoming more pervasive than ever.”

—Ellen Harold, in Compulsive Reader

“[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.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“The plot of Tabitha, Stay Up certainly gives its delightfully eccentric protagonist plenty to navigate, but the novel’s greatest pleasure lies elsewhere: inside Tabitha’s endlessly curious, funny, and frequently misguided mind. Reading her observations feels less like following a traditional narrative than borrowing someone else’s way of seeing the world. Every page offers a fresh reminder that ordinary life becomes extraordinary when filtered through an imagination as peculiar as hers…. What ultimately makes Tabitha, Stay Up so rewarding is that its humor and heart never compete with one another…. Few novels so thoroughly immerse readers in a singular consciousness, and fewer still make that consciousness feel like such welcome company.”

—Allison Renner, in Microlit

“A breathtaking work of art … an uncompromising and unsentimental experiment weighing the value of sacrifice…. Daring, challenging, and timely.”

—Gabriel Hart, in Beyond the Last Estate, #7

“The twenty-five stories collected in Someone Should Know This Story … offer a testament to the sustained creative achievement of Merrill Joan Gerber. Not as well-known as her contemporary Cynthia Ozick (among Gerber’s admirers), this deeply moving collection showcases Gerber’s penetrating psychological portraits of Jewish family life in transition…. Gerber’s ultimate subject is women who feel suffocated…. trailed by inescapable pasts, haunted by enigmatic memories that remain unresolved…. Gerber’s stories richly map the Jewish American experience during the mid-twentieth century.”

—Donald Weber, in Jewish Book Council

“Great writers constantly swim against the tide. There’s great risk in leaving the safety of the coastline, the comfort of breaths unencumbered by sea spray, the warmth of the sunlight on skin. In between strokes, they look over their shoulder and see the shoreline get smaller and smaller, but once they reach a certain point they stop, and they float, and they realize they can see everything. From here, the coast no longer looks small. It looks complete…. In The Coast of Everything, stories are told to move people forward, to challenge notions of what stories even are, to fight against the proverbial dying of the light…. In one particular passage, a man presses an ink nib onto a sheet of paper and watches the ink spread into random patterns as it soaks into the fibrous paper. ‘To be ink is to be what is,’ he tells us. ‘To be paper is to be what is not yet, or what is not yet known.’ It is this unknown that compels us to swim against the tide.”

—Jeff Chon, in Orange Country Review of Books

“The Coast of Everything is told by Clara, a girl travelling up a mountain in a litter carried by two young friends to see what a mysterious local entrepreneur has built. The setting is reminiscent of Stitch’s first novel, Lake of Urine, a dark fairytale in which the author honed a strange, bracing wit that is balanced in The Coast of Everything with a more poetic impulse…. With its Russian doll structure, the logic of The Coast of Everything is of narrators narrating narrators narrating; it is the unreliable storyteller turned up to the max. The novel therefore requires patience and attention, some of which is tested … but is mostly rewarded, not least at the sentence level (Stitch is wonderful on colours and shades)…. [The] ambitious, provocative nature of a book happily out of step with the plain-style trend of contemporary fiction is refreshing.”

—W.J. Davies, in 3:AM Magazine

“This sprawling novel is variously dizzying, maddening, and meandering, which adds to the charm of its four interlocking tales…. ‘The Tale of the Isle of Truth’ focuses on a group of colonists who are analyzing forbidden works for a shadowy collective, the Magistracy, whose Kafkaesque edicts will feel all too familiar in a world battling antidemocratic insurgency. So will the yearnings of archivist Arenaceous Nell and his daughter, Lil, for a higher purpose beyond the busy work that still remains for them after the island closes as a surveillance station. Readers will be drawn to how their natural hunger for freedom chafes against the constraints imposed by the relentlessly creepy Stationmaster Jasper Fafl…. Stitch’s playful storytelling tricks won’t move readers who desire brevity as an end in itself. But for those who desire an antidote to our current blink-it-and-miss-it culture, this novel may well occupy a point of pride on their bedside tables. A sprawling but playful and black-humored sophomore effort that upends standard storytelling tropes.”

—Kirkus Reviews