RaveFull Stop... an exquisite piece of literature which might well become an instant cult book until it makes its way to a much deserved place at the top of any list of utopian-dystopian fiction masterworks. Timely and timeless, written in the style of the most extraordinary fabulists, and recalling some encouraging ideas from the past centuries’ revolutionaries and utopianists, The Eyelid is a poetic exploration of sleep and a guided excursion to a marvelously idiosyncratic land of dreams. Wisely insurrectional, like any authentic aesthetical endeavor, it confronts us with a fictional environment — one not so different from our own society — in which both sleeping and dreaming are being culturally and politically threatened ... a refreshed dream of dreams inspired by the great dreamers of all times — Schwob, Pessoa, Swift, Schulz, Manganelli, Carroll, and Poe — and invoked from a para-modern nonconformist past. The story Chrostowska dares to dream in her intensely poetic, straightforward narrative style, is presented as a series of powerfully evocative short scenes taken from a journey through the looking-glass of lucid unconsciousness.
Gary Lutz
PositiveFull StopLutz’s stories are less the literary equivalent of stylized Instagram snapshots or artsy TikTok videos than careful montages made from the serial recordings of a surveillance camera: they often capture the ephemerality of a memory-moment, but what remains in the caption afterwards is the faintest evidence —like the graphic documentation of slight intensity oscilations in a continuous energy flow — of the storytelling’s permanent inadequacy to tell a story ... Lutz finds a viable alternative to what David Foster Wallace once considered the arrogant cynicism of the postmodern intellectual artist, without slipping down into the superficial naturalism of sincerity cults. There’s no nostalgia or hypocritical self-deprecating in those, often happily, undetermined protagonists. Lutz’s characters approach the infrathin space left by the general collapse of privacy and intimacy with the deep sincerity of someone who’s naively caught into the language trap ... We must be grateful to Tyrant Books for putting all of Gary Lutz’s stories together in this volume — with the hope that The Complete Gary Lutz will be not so complete soon.
Agustín Fernández Mallo, Trans. by Thomas Bunstead
PositiveAsymptoteIt is...simply a wonderful work of avant-gardist fiction ... In a book with so many characters, invented and imported from other fictions and from reality, the true protagonist is order—thus art ... Cosmic order found and produced as the positive force that prevents the entropic collapse of the universe. A more local and humble literary ordering that presents instant, not consistent, relationships. Not just order emerging from chaos, but also as a consequence of the most eccentric human needs and desires ... The world is presented here as an ‘ecology of the Anthropocene’ in which waste and randomly ordered natural and human-made objects spontaneously rearrange themselves to produce new levels of meaning. Fernández Mallo sees the world as a tinkerer taking advantage of any available stuff, and in our time waste is by far the most available material.
