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Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher
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English
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PANORAMA

Steve Kistulentz

A startling debut that ties together a diverse cast of characters whose lives will be forever changed by tragedy.
Richard MacMurray, a cable news talking head, is paid handsomely to pontificate on the issues of the moment. On New Year's Day he is scheduled to be a guest on a prominent Sunday-morning talk show. But as he awaits the broadcast, the network interrupts with news that a jet airliner has crashed in Dallas, killing everyone on board. Within an hour, amateur videotape surfaces of the plane's last moments. Its repetitive broadcast transforms the crash into a living image: familiar, constant, and horrifying. That afternoon, Richard learns that his sister Mary Beth was aboard the doomed flight, leaving behind her six-year-old son, Gabriel. Richard is the boy's only living relative.

With time-compressed intensity and a kaleidoscopic sweep reminiscent of Tom Rachman's The Imperfectionists, PANORAMA dramatizes the ever-widening impact of a single event over the span of one day, on the victims and their loved ones, yes, but also on others: the plane's mechanic, the airport janitor working the night shift, and even casual observers such as a teenager in a dingy motel who catches the plane's final moments on video.

Kistulentz captures the sprawl of contemporary America-its culture, its values, the workaday existence of its people-with precision, humanity, humor, and hope. And yet within this novel's expansive scope emerges an intimate portrait of human loss-children now without parents, lovers without partners, goodbyes left entirely unsaid. But when Richard brings home Gabriel and embarks on his second chapter, he does so with hope, picking up the pieces and carrying on, as we must.

Steve Kistulentz is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and Florida State University. His fiction has appeared, among other places, in Narrative and a special issue of Mississippi Reviewon emerging writers guest edited by Rick Moody. He is also the author of two books of poetry: The Luckless Age, which won the Benjamin Saltman Award, and Little Black Daydream. He directs the graduate creative writing program at Saint Leo University in Florida, and is currently working on a second novel.
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Book

Published 2018-03-06 by Little, Brown and Company

Book

Published 2018-03-06 by Little, Brown and Company

Comments

Panorama lives up to its title. This is a novel aswim in language, in drama, in character -- it has the kind of bigness we too rarely see in fiction anymore. Steve Kistulentz is a hell of a writer, and this is a hell of a hard book to put down.

PANORAMA is a Chicago Review of Books Most Anticipated Fiction Book of 2018

Fast-paced, energetic, searing. There are moments in Steve Kistulentz's Panorama that will take your breath away.

It has been said that a good novelist is also by default a first-rate sociologist and psychologist, too -- along with being a magician. Panorama perfectly exemplifies this truth. In sharp, smart prose, Steve Kistulentz portrays the terrible strands of tragedy. The result is an engrossing, powerful, capacious novel, and a very impressive debut.

Written with an intimate precision, Panorama brings tremendous compassion to people we take for granted ...This book, with its enormous ambition, serves to remind us that it's necessary and human to feel.

A heartbreaking but ultimately heartfilling day in the life of a country in existential crisis, a panorama of points of view, and a novel about the ways we lose and find one another. Just read it.

PANORAMA is a remarkable literary work, rare in its ability to be both thematically complex and a compelling read. Steve Kistulentz remarkably transforms our TV culture's participatory tragedy into a deep meditation on human connectedness. This is a stunning debut by an important new writer.

Kistulentz confidently sets up and populates the panorama of the book's title...This book has the architecture of a great novel...A writer worth watching.