The Curvature Of An Absence
Jorge Armenteros

ISBN ​​​​​978-1-959556-95-4       264 pages         $22.00

The Curvature of an Absence, set in an unnamed coastal village, contemplates the nature of what no longer exists (or doesn’t yet exist). But this is really a point of departure for a questing narrator who, while in conversation with the likes of Rilke, Cortazar, and Bolaño, uses words to dust for fingerprints left by various aspects of the universe—the presence of absence, the architecture of a passing moment, the strange forces that bind friends and lovers. In spare prose that is quietly lyrical and languidly hypnotic, Armenteros makes much of little in this fable-like landscape that seems to inhabit an eternal present. 
     Vincent Czyz 

What if you were to go to the shore one ordinary day and find that the sea is gone, absent. What if that literal absence calls forth as it were the jinn of absence. What if the only way to answer the questions that absence proposes is to work with a friend writing “parallel” books, novels. What might yours look like? How might you answer absence, as though it were a question? This life-challenge jorge armenteros poses in the brilliantly conceived structure of his complex surreal motif—recalling the intellectualism of Camus and the terror of Kafka—becomes a quest for meaning in a void at the heart of the human condition. It is at once comic absurd bleak and a joyous journey to deny nothing and to love doing so. 
     Martin Nakell

On Jorge Armenteros        

Bravo for the hands that write such musical sentences. Bravo for the imagination that dares to show us what a novel can do. Bravo for this new book by Jorge Armenteros.           
   Peter Grandbois        

As Armenteros writes in one of The Spiral of Words’ many fine passages, “That is the danger; a book may be bolder than yourself and reveal what you refuse to accept.”           
   Laird Hunt        

Armenteros compels us to hear our own roar of the river and follow the course. He is one of our most innovative, introspective and brilliant writers.           
   American Book Review        

Armenteros evokes the dreamscapes and desires of Marquez, Joyce, and Ballard while asserting his own distinctive voice.           
   D. Harlan Wilson