Utterance
Divorcer
By Gary Lutz
Calamari Press, 2011
120 pages / $13 Buy from SPD
It’s no wonder that someone who might be said to live in the sentence would apply its logic—and its subversions—to his lens on the higher-order structures of life. In Divorcer, Gary Lutz tinkers with each level of human-linguistic interaction, cascading from social power structures, to family dynamics, personal relationships, full-scale utterances, isolated sentences, words, morphemes and phonemes, with an eye to at-once humorous and devastating exposure of the failures of empathy and failures of semantic coherence echoing throughout.
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September 12th, 2011 / 12:00 pm
September 12th, 2011 / 12:00 pm
2 New from Calamari: Gary Lutz’s Divorcer & Vincent Standley’s A Mortal Affect
Calamari Press jumps back to action with two exciting new titles, both now available for order: Gary Lutz’s Divorcer & Vincent Standley’s A Mortal Affect.
“DIVORCER is a collection of seven harrowing and hyperprecise short stories about ruinous relationships and their aftershocks.” $13
“A Mortal Affect is a satire of meaning systems targeting the role bureaucracy and cultural assumptions play in creating, distorting, and replicating the things we believe to be true. Informed by an absurdism in the Modernist vein, the novel is a celebration of error and folly that questions the wisdom of conviction and the faith in metaphysics. These themes play out in a fictional world inhabited by mortals and immortals, the oppressed and the oppressors. The former understand their condition of being oppressed but have no concept of freedom, while the latter emulate mortals but lack the ability to eat, reproduce, or die, even by suicide. Never allegorical or polemical, the novel operates comfortably within the bounds of comedy, avoiding the earnestness and self-conscious urgency common to the novel of ideas.” $18
Blake Butler—
Excited this morning to notice an update to the Calamari Press website listing four new forthcoming titles after somewhat of a hiatus, including: Gary Lutz’s Divorcer, Derek White’s ARK CODEX 0, and two debuts, A Mortal Affect by Vincent Standley and Sister Stop Breathing by Chiara Barzini.
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