Looking for some good short fiction? Look no more!
by Ernie on 19/04/10 at 8:31 pm
I was out in Los Angeles last weekend to give a reading with Tim Green at the Ruskin Arts Club. While there, I hit a few classic LA spots, like the Rainbow Room and Book Soup, both on Sunset Strip. While there, I looked for something to read on my return flight. At random, my eyes landed on Damion Searls’s What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going. It is a slim volume, which suited me, given that it was actually one of two books I would have for my flight. It is issued by the Dalkey Archive Press, which is like a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval for new fiction. And it was signed by Searls during a recent reading at the store. Although the blurbs by Kunkel and Gessen did little at first to persuade me, I decided to purchase it, and I am very happy that I did. It was a risk that paid off. I love this book. It is fresh, intelligent, and entertaining.
Go forth and seek it out, readers! Or just click on the embedded Amazon link below. I do all the work for you.
Visit the author’s website at: http://www.damionsearls.com/
A too spare debut collection of five elegantly crafted stories by translator Searls (Rilke’s The Inner Sky) explores the exquisite indignities suffered by those with rich inner lives. The well-read narrator of the dry “56 Water Street” attempts to write a novel about a man who circles back to where he came from, much like the fastidious writer himself whose girlfriend is soon to leave him because he is unable to plan what happens next. “The Cubicles” is a delightful dig at the vacuous new economy of Northern California, wherein the narrator is ensconced in a nebulous position at the punnily nicknamed Prophet Corp. There, leading a life of Circean pleasures which keeps him from becoming a writer, he chronicles the other sad cube-dwellers. Self-consciously writerly, Searls’s work possesses a schoolmarmish charm and hints at the fresh, smart talent he may one day become. – Publisher’s Weekly
“A series of highly imaginative and original takes on the contemporary world, both sophisticated and quirky, elegant and unique.” – Edith Grossman
“Literature is dead, everyone knows that, and also—another thing everyone knows—all the great literature has already been written. But if we were somehow to begin bringing literature into the present day, we’d do it by updating, reimagining, rewriting, and then finally once and for all forgetting the past masters. That is what, in these funny, eclectic, and ultimately very contemporary stories, Damion Searls somehow manages to do.” – Keith Gessen
“These stories not only read beautifully and feel true; I don’t think I’ve ever read anything that seems at once so off-hand and so formally exacting. Damion Searls’s work gives me an idea of how the short story can keep on going, what its future might be.” – Benjamin Kunkel
