reading notes

by Benjamin Rosenbaum
ISBN: 9781931520539

I usually notice the category the publisher prints on a book. Usually it is straightforward or boring, such as the simple “fiction” or the ridiculous “fiction/literature”. As if we needed one more reason to think the folks at Small Beer Press were fantastic, this book’s categorization is “short stories/plausible fabulism”.

If you have doubts about plausible fabulism, perhaps “Biographical Notes to ‘A Discourse on the Nature of Causality, with Air-Planes’ by Benjamin Rosenbaum” (the fourth story in the book) will answer them. You’ll learn more about gumballs, VC money, and video games in real life before you get there — and that is in just the first story. Then come the grandmothers and giants, and a self-sacrificing orange ruling the world; then the plausible fabulist.

There are thirteen more stories, with a tiger, a virus subverting utopia, and great battles in “The House Beyond Your Sky” and “A Siege of Cranes” among the strangeness. Reading them, I never knew what would happen or even what sort of story the next one would be. I loved that. Rosenbaum writes stories that manage to be both technicolor weird and yank at those places inside you that make your throat do that swallowy I’m going to cry thing. Highly recommended.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 31st, 2009 at 9:16 pm and is filed under fiction.