A BOOK WITH NO AUTHOR
Brent Robison
A BOOK WITH NO AUTHOR
Brent Robison
A BOOK WITH NO AUTHOR
A novel
A manuscript arrives in the mail, sent by mistake. It asks the question: What if your private life was made public by someone you’ve never met? Stories within stories tell of two men: a photographer whose life is upended as he seeks the elusive writer who’s invaded his world, and the writer who exploits his newfound gift for telling tales and violating boundaries. But is any of this real? If such a book arrived anonymously on your doorstep, could you just let it go? An obsessive search for the author becomes a hall of mirrors, echoed both inside and outside the mystery manuscript. Where is truth? Who owns your life story? And where do stories come from, anyway?
A manuscript arrives in the mail, sent by mistake. It asks the question: What if your private life was made public by someone you’ve never met? Stories within stories tell of two men: a photographer whose life is upended as he seeks the elusive writer who’s invaded his world, and the writer who exploits his newfound gift for telling tales and violating boundaries. But is any of this real? If such a book arrived anonymously on your doorstep, could you just let it go? An obsessive search for the author becomes a hall of mirrors, echoed both inside and outside the mystery manuscript. Where is truth? Who owns your life story? And where do stories come from, anyway?
Reviews
This novel is a whack in the head. A Book with No Author is a fascinating story that knocks our sense of reality to pieces. As I read this novel I had to glance at the author’s name, printed at the top of every left-hand page, to assure myself that the chapters were written by Brent Robison, and not by fictional characters who came into being by contributing chapters of their own. Like the real world reflected in a mirror, everything here is recognizable and familiar except, of course, that left and right have been switched around and so have we. Brent Robison is a master at making us doubt our selves and our realities, and A Book with No Author shows him at the top of his wonderfully engaging game. If there is fiction beyond metafiction, a category for impossible evidence and mind-bending logic, this book is it.
—Eugene Mirabelli, author of Renato!, 2021 Silver IPPY Award
Intellectually ambitious but tenderly invested in characters linked by their curiously shared stories, Robison questions authorship itself without sacrificing the authenticity of storytelling. By turns charming and (intentionally) frustrating, this Rubik’s Cube of a book lingers after the last page is turned.
—Deirdre Day, artist and writer
—John Burdick, musician and Hudson Valley One critic
This novel is a whack in the head. A Book with No Author is a fascinating story that knocks our sense of reality to pieces. As I read this novel I had to glance at the author’s name, printed at the top of every left-hand page, to assure myself that the chapters were written by Brent Robison, and not by fictional characters who came into being by contributing chapters of their own. Like the real world reflected in a mirror, everything here is recognizable and familiar except, of course, that left and right have been switched around and so have we. Brent Robison is a master at making us doubt our selves and our realities, and A Book with No Author shows him at the top of his wonderfully engaging game. If there is fiction beyond metafiction, a category for impossible evidence and mind-bending logic, this book is it.
—Eugene Mirabelli, author of Renato!, 2021 Silver IPPY Award
Intellectually ambitious but tenderly invested in characters linked by their curiously shared stories, Robison questions authorship itself without sacrificing the authenticity of storytelling. By turns charming and (intentionally) frustrating, this Rubik’s Cube of a book lingers after the last page is turned.
—Deirdre Day, artist and writer
—John Burdick, musician and Hudson Valley One critic
Hear excerpts and discussions on The Strange Recital podcast
Excerpt from A Book with No Author
A Book with No Author
About the author
Brent Robison lives in the Catskill Mountains of New York with his wife, a maker of fabulous masks. His fiction has appeared in over a dozen literary journals and several anthologies, and has won the Literal Latte Short Short Award, the Chronogram Short Fiction Contest, a Fiction Fellowship from the New Jersey Council on the Arts, and a Pushcart Prize nomination. He is the author of a story collection, The Principle of Ultimate Indivisibility, and two novels, Ponckhockie Union and A Book with No Author, all from Recital Publishing. He blogs occasionally at Ultimate-Indivisibility, and co-hosts The Strange Recital, a monthly podcast about fiction that questions the nature of reality.
Brent Robison lives in the Catskill Mountains of New York with his wife, a maker of fabulous masks. His fiction has appeared in over a dozen literary journals and several anthologies, and has won the Literal Latte Short Short Award, the Chronogram Short Fiction Contest, a Fiction Fellowship from the New Jersey Council on the Arts, and a Pushcart Prize nomination. He is the author of a story collection, The Principle of Ultimate Indivisibility, and two novels, Ponckhockie Union and A Book with No Author, all from Recital Publishing. He blogs occasionally at Ultimate-Indivisibility, and co-hosts The Strange Recital, a monthly podcast about fiction that questions the nature of reality.
The Author's Choice
We ask authors to recommend a book.
The Art of Hunger: Essays, Prefaces, Interviews
by Paul Auster
Published by Sun & Moon Press, 1991
This early nonfiction collection by one of my favorite fiction authors digs deep into Hamsun, Kafka, Beckett, Mallarme, Dada, French poetry, and much more. A banquet of rich food for thought! The last sentence of the book is Auster's first-person statement: "Yet another testimony to my own ignorance."