NON/FICTION
Short stories, flash fiction, nonfiction prose, and prose poetry. Published by Edge Books (2010). 142 pages. Available at Edge Books, Abe Books, and Amazon. Design by Justin Sirois. Cover art by Martin Gutstein.
Excerpt from full review:
“The almost-poetry combined with almost-prose leaves room for language and images: “I am the brother of a man who, after a moment, needs his brother,” reads a mid-book piece. “I go to him and for the first time, we embrace. Two men in a grasp so sound, it’s astonishing.” The narrator is all grasp, and so we go with him, erasing genre lines as we go. That’s how it feels to read Non/fiction. —Amy Whipple, PANK Magazine
Advance praise:
Having conjured up that particular mix of will, heartwreck, and sheer wonder that makes for a large part of the human condition, Gutstein presents it to us through the nuance-rippled glass of his unique vision—a vision at once powerful, canny, restless, and sweeping—in sentences that make of muscularity a haunting new music. Deadpan poignancy and a fable-like resonance to these ‘non-fictions’—a striking debut. —Carl Phillips
In his stirring collection, non/fiction, Dan Gutstein has perfected the short-short form, what Irving Howe calls, “…a moment rendered in its wink of immediacy.” These stories combine the compression of poetry and the insistent narrative line of fiction in just enough space for you to inhale, hold your breath and then find it again … just before it’s taken away. Read this haunting and witty book. You will be nourished; you will be comforted; you will be unsettled; you will laugh out loud. —Faye Moskowitz
Dan Gutstein is one of the most dangerous writers operating in America today. He bends form, bends language, and bends your ear, making non/fiction a book that poets and prosers, alike, can celebrate. May it become the Gold Standard for multi-genre writing. —Kevin Moffett
Dan Gutstein’s non/fiction is a series of sudden and provocative marvels, each as spare and vivid as a poem and as densely complex as a novel. Gutstein’s brief fictions are miniature masterpieces, funny, provocative, original, and heartbreaking. —Richard McCann
non/fiction, Dan Gutstein’s collection of short/shorts, is one of the most innovative and compelling books I’ve read in a good long time. These prose pieces defy description. By turns, narrative and lyric, essayistic and incantatory, funny and heart wrenching, goofy and deadly serious, they range over an astonishing variety of subjects in an equally impressive variety of idioms. Each piece bristles with its own particular energy and insight. In its mongrel nature, it’s a profoundly American book, a book about and for our moment, a book that enlarges the possibilities of what both fiction and poetry (and nonfiction, for that matter) can and ought to do. —Alan Shapiro