by R. M. Berry

Fourteen enactments of radical undoing by the acclaimed author of Leonardo's Horse and Plane Geometry and Other Affairs of the Heart. Reviews of unwritten novels, prefaces to fraudulent books, narratives of dictionary entries, and one interminable sentence, all written in a style as strewn with landmines as everyday speech. In 'Mimesis' a semi-literate surveyor struggles against metaphysical abandonment in a Florida swamp; in 'Torture!' an anthropologist leaves his lifelong study of cruelty mysteriously unwritten; and in 'A Theory of Fiction' a ruined man finds revenge in misrepresenting every injustice he's ever suffered. Nothing seems the matter. Everything appears to be wrong. From first word to last, these are fictions of impossible everydayness, where the telling of what's happening proves the unlikeliest feat of all.