Inventive, disconcerting, and hilarious, Daniel Grandbois's present-day fables call to mind Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories as readily as they do Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics, Rikki Ducornet's Butcher's Tales, and Woody Allen's most literary writings. Braced on the shoulders of the fabulists, fantasists, flash-fictionists, absurdists, surrealists, and satirists who came before him, Daniel Grandbois dredges up impossible meanings from the mineral and plant kingdoms, as well as the animal, and serves them to us as if they were nothing more fantastic than a plate of eggs and ham.
Like Zen koans, these stories playfully short-circuit the brain to bypass normal thought and open the mind to undiscovered worlds of perception. As the human organism responds inexplicably to music, to particular combination of notes of varying pitches and durations and the intervals of silence between them, so too it responds in profound yet ultimately incomprehensible ways to the absurd, twisted language of Grandbois' poetic prose.
RSS All imagery and content © 2013 City Lights. All rights reserved.
