Vendor
	Liepman Literary Agency Marc Koralnik
Original language
English

A COLLAPSE OF HORSES

Brian Evenson

Brian Evenson is the recipient of three O. Henry Prizes as well as an NEA fellowship. He has authored ten books of fiction. In 2009 he published the novel Last Days, which won the American Library Association's award for Best Horror Novel of 2009, and the collection Fugue State, both of which were on Time Out New York's best books of 2009 list. His novel The Open Curtain (Coffee House Press) was a finalist for an Edgar Award and an IHG Award. His work has been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese and Slovenian. Brian directs Brown University's Literary Arts Program. Other books include The Wavering Knife (which won the IHG Award for best story collection), Dark Property, and Altmann's Tongue (Knopf). He has translated work by Christian Gailly, Jean Frémon, Claro, Jacques Jouet, Eric Chevillard, Antoine Volodine, and others.

Available products
Book Published by Coffee House Press

Comments

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"Brian Evenson is one of the treasures of American story writing, a true successor both to the generation of Coover, Barthelme, Hawkes and Co., but also to Edgar Allan Poe."

"For my money, Brian Evenson is one of the most consistently vital and unnerving voices in writing today ... No matter where you start with Evenson's work, the door is wide ajar, and once you go through it you won't be coming out.", Blake Butler, Vice Read more...

Lately I've been thinking about what constitutes horror in fiction, because the forms the genre takes have become so fluid, so different from the older models of stories about monsters and otherworldly creatures and even malign lingering spirits. Although all those sorts of things still creep and crawl and slither through the popular imagination, and reliably generate the desired fear and loathing in the reader, a lot of fiction these days seems less interested in producing great shocks than in creating a pervasive, generalized sense of unease monsters that don't so much chase us as surround us, like something toxic in the air . One of those writers, Brian Evenson, has a new collection of stories called A COLLAPSE OF HORSES (Coffee House, paper, $16.95), which embodies this hard-to-define aesthetic pretty strikingly or maybe what it's actually doing is disembodying something else. Evenson's fiction is stark and often jaw-droppingly funny. In The Dust, a nearly conventional science-fiction horror tale, you will find, for example, this sentence: Orvar was certain, or fairly certain, that he hadn't slit the man's throat himself. Some of the stories here evoke Kafka, some Poe, some Beckett, some Roald Dahl, and one, a demonic teddy-bear chiller called BearHeart, even Stephen King, but Evenson's deadpan style always estranges them a bit from their models: He tells his odd tales oddly, as if his mouth were dry and the words won't come out right. How is he to know where one thing starts and another ends? asks one of Evenson's characters, and that, in a nutshell, is the nature of horror in his fiction: the condition of being unable to identify any boundaries. A character in the brilliant title story suffers from a sort of epistemological panic: Not knowing is something you can only suspend yourself in for the briefest moment, he thinks. No, even if what you have to face is horrible, is an inexplicably dead herd of horses, even an explicably dead family, it must be faced. He puts the people in his fiction through a lot: confinement, mutilation, cognitive blurring and quite a bit of what Daffy Duck once characterized as pronoun trouble: His characters can misplace their sense of themselves in midsentence. No, I doesn't sound right. I can't do it: he. They're as mad as Poe's narrators and as stoic as Buster Keaton. Is this horror? I think it is. Or he does. Terrence Rafferty Read more...

The Dark Fiction of an Ex-Mormon Writer Read more...

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