spuytenduyvil

Tim Shaner’s poet’s novel is a page-turner!  He carries all the addictive qualities of wringing the world through poetry with prose, a sense of absolute frankness at work.  Shaner aims at our culture’s many irritable limbs, yet he brings the poets alive, weaving them and waving hello with them from inside the deep muscle of the book.  You are going to love this!

     CAConrad, author of While Standing in Line for Death

 

In I Hate Fiction a character named Tim Shaner is working on a piece of fiction in the style of Thomas Bernhard to avoid working on his dissertation. If by working on it, we mean thinking a lot about it. And thinking about other things too. The neighbor’s jeep, what he knows about who in the Buffalo Poetics Program. Rob Greiner, that sort of stuff. Poets write the darndest novels. And this one is funny, irreverent, and meta.

     Juliana Spahr, author of That Night the Wolf Came

 

For we who admit our love of splendid artifice, Tim Shaner’s I Hate Fiction arrives just in time. I Hate Fiction enlists an imaginary curriculum based in real readings. Its canon is a forgery, but aren’t all canons forgeries? In I Hate Fiction, our narrator is provoked by what they’re reading: Thomas Bernhard, Lyn Hejinian, Kathy Acker; but also whatever’s on television, at the store, the baby’s crying, the phone is ringing, and do not neglect whatever is brewing over at the porter’s lodge. This is a fierce, funny, and totally fictional book whose polemic gestures towards what we might actually find ourselves believing in. I can’t see how this book doesn’t win the National Book Award a few months after its release. I loved it.

     Brandon Brown, author of The Good Life and Top 40