For those of you not trolling MySpace, Dzanc Books has unveiled the look of their first title, Roy Kesey's All Over:
Some other nice things said about this book besides the cover comment from Peter Ho Davies:
For those keen to know the next generation of the American short story, consider All Over, which features the loopy paranoia of Don DeLillo, the po-mo-mo whimsy of Donald Barthelme, the spooky learnedness of Thomas Pynchon, the high-minded literary sleight-of-hand of Robert Coover and John Barth, and the secret geek speak of George Saunders. Add a touch of the Brothers Grimm, Jules Verne, and the Looney Tunes, and you've got a book of a million moving parts, all of which work in breath-taking harmony to keep illusion aloft.
- Lee K. Abbott, author of All Things, All at Once: Collected Stories, and five other collections
Roy Kesey's excellent All Over is all over intelligent, intense, often very funny and frequently, frankly, beautiful. Stories in this collection will imminently appear in slightly different form in the deepest, darkest corners of your mind where they will burn, very, very brightly, for hours.
- Laird Hunt, author of The Paris Stories, The Impossibly, Indiana, Indiana, and The Exquisite
In All Over, Roy Kesey's postmodern parables are stunning mash-ups of style, content, characters. The book is a narrative train wreck that keeps happening of arcane jumbled juxtaposed graffitied rolling stock crashing into horribly hilarious verbal clown car kinetic sculpture.
- Michael Martone, author of The Flatness and Other Landscapes, Michael Martone and other titles
Reading Roy Kesey is like being allowed to peep momentarily through a mysterious hole in the wall into a hidden universe that is very much like ours only slightly brighter, slightly sadder, certainly no less odd. Violinists play in the rain to keep swallows in flight. Strange, leaking packages tied up with string wait to be opened. In other words, Roy Kesey is a delight to read.
- Samantha Hunt, author of The Seas
Roy Kesey tempers his prodigious imagination with fine syntactic control, so that his stories -- like Donald Barthelme's -- feel simultaneously free-wheeling and precise. All Over is an exhilarating collection -- funny, harrowing, smart, odd and inventive.
- Chris Bachelder, author of Bear v. Shark, and U.S!
These stories by Roy Kesey, in the way they brilliantly blend humor and pathos, remind me of coins tossed in the air, turning over and over, one side cast in light, the other in darkness. His writing is original, fearless, strikingly funny, and clean -- so clean -- his words sharp enough to cut the eye.
- Benjamin Percy, author of The Language of Elk and Refresh, Refresh
Roy Kesey manifests his keen sense of human emotion not only in the sensual details of his fictions, but in their essential structures and narrative strategies. To say these fictions have breadth and depth is too shallow. These are three-dimensional affecting experiences wrought from prose.
- Cris Mazza, author of Waterbaby, and many other books
All Over is the strangest, best collection of stories you will read this year. With a seamless blend of lyricism and minimalism, Roy Kesey travels All Over the terrain of the psyche, the human condition, the relationships we have and fail to have. These stories team with insights, little horrors, moments of sweet verity, and surreal surprise. The characters are persuasive, and the storytelling is both hallucinatory and familiar. This is a new voice you must hear.
- Laura Kasischke, author of Be Mine, and five other titles
More information to come!
Ooh, I love the cover. Very nice!
Posted by: Mary Akers | March 21, 2007 at 03:58 PM
Strong cover. The cigarettes are great.
Posted by: Pamela E | March 24, 2007 at 10:39 AM
Love it, head to toe. Can't wait for this book!
Posted by: Alicia Gifford | March 24, 2007 at 02:07 PM
Great cover. Now I have to go outside and have a smoke.
Posted by: Martin Cloutier | March 24, 2007 at 05:18 PM
Great cover and look at those blurbs. I'm ready to read this book right this second.
Posted by: Myfanwy Collins | March 25, 2007 at 07:31 AM
Cannot wait to read this. Kesey explodes with energy. I love his work--jessica lipnack
Posted by: jessica lipnack | March 25, 2007 at 01:38 PM