Dzanc Books

Roy Kesey's "All Over" available for pre-order NOW!!!

"A restlessly inventive collection, as the best story collections so often are -- comic and tender, ironic and earnest, deadpan and passionate.  A distinctive new voice, from a distinctive new press."

-- Peter Ho Davies, author of The Welsh Girl

All Over will be in stores October 23, 2007, but you can guarantee your copy by pre-ordering one today by visiting http://www.dzancbooks.org/allover.html and clicking on the PRE-ORDER button.  For just $13.95 plus $4 postage and handling, you will either have a copy delivered to your door just before the book hits stores, or, if you prefer, a signed copy will arrive about one week after the book is publicly available (once you order, we'll contact you to find out which you prefer).

Roy Kesey has been hailed as one of our best young writers, and All Over presents 19 of his most original and latest stories. George Saunders called Kesey’s writing, “beautiful and powerful... mythic, vivid, heart-rending." Roy's work has appeared in over 50 top flight literary journals,including Alaskan Quarterly Review, Mississippi Review, and The Georgia Review.  Several of the stories in All Over first appeared in journals such as The Kenyan Review, McSweeney's, Other Voices and The Iowa Review.  His story "Wait" will be included in Best American Short Stories 2007.

"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

The Cover!

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!