THE PRINCIPLE OF ULTIMATE INDIVISIBILITY

Brent Robison

THE PRINCIPLE OF ULTIMATE INDIVISIBILITY

Brent Robison

THE PRINCIPLE OF ULTIMATE INDIVISIBILITY

A web of stories

The Principle of Ultimate Indivisibility weaves together the disparate lives of ordinary people as they stumble through tiny everyday epiphanies on their way from confusion and loss toward redemption. With structures both traditional and experimental, these thirteen linked stories explore the bonds of family...the impacts of religion...our intertwined struggles with grief, love, and addiction...the intangible circuits of influence that link us to strangers...and the blind but determined striving for consciousness that is common to human experience. Stories in the collection have been published in a variety of journals and anthologies and have won a Short Fiction Award and an Honorable Mention from Chronogram Magazine, a Fiction Fellowship from the New Jersey Council on the Arts, and a Pushcart Prize nomination.

The Principle of Ultimate Indivisibility weaves together the disparate lives of ordinary people as they stumble through tiny everyday epiphanies on their way from confusion and loss toward redemption. With structures both traditional and experimental, these thirteen linked stories explore the bonds of family...the impacts of religion...our intertwined struggles with grief, love, and addiction...the intangible circuits of influence that link us to strangers...and the blind but determined striving for consciousness that is common to human experience. Stories in the collection have been published in a variety of journals and anthologies and have won a Short Fiction Award and an Honorable Mention from Chronogram Magazine, a Fiction Fellowship from the New Jersey Council on the Arts, and a Pushcart Prize nomination.

Reviews

Subtlety ought to be on an endangered literary species list, but Brent Robison brilliantly makes the case for its essentiality in this exquisite collection of webbed stories. These stories argue that everything is a facet of the same jewel and we touch each other's lives in unfathomable ways. To read them is to heighten one's bond with strangers.
—Djelloul Marbrook, award-winning poet/novelist, Far from Algiers, The Light Piercing Water Trilogy
 
Rich, layered images take us deep inside the lives of Robison's characters, their stories weaving together a tapestry as textured as it is beautiful. Brent Robison's stories are reminiscent of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio – stories of ordinary people caught in the crosshairs of circumstance, sometimes of their own making, sometimes not. All of them heroic in their honest struggle to find meaning and ultimately love.... A gorgeous, timeless collection about longing.
—Susan Richards, NY Times bestselling author, Chosen by a Horse, Saddled, Chosen Forever
 
The Principle of Ultimate Indivisibility is a collection of linked short stories, and each one of them is a delight: a sparsely-written, surprising delight which illuminates unexpected corners of its characters’ lives and in so doing, reveals their obsessions, loves and longings with ruthless clarity.
—Jane Smith, The Self-Publishing Review
 
It’s a feast of food for thought, a richly imagined reality that looks much like our own would if we could really see it. Robison has a lyrical and evocative style and a deep affection for human foibles, and wandering through the maze he has woven is oddly intoxicating.
—Anne Pyburn Craig, Chronogram magazine
 
It's a great first book…. Some of the stories rise to memorable slices of life, and the overall breadth of the characters engaged, and the types of experience worked through, show a true humanist's heart at work. Moreover, the use of a fractured story structure, where characters, actions and similar reactions come together over time, lend the overall work the tragic air of great epics, with people doing all they can to escape fate's plans for them; and yet also the bittersweet quality we recognize in the best comedies, where folks keep pressing on, no matter what pushes them back.
—Paul Smart, The Woodstock Times
 
If you’re looking for intelligent, grown-up, philosophical, short literary fiction then I can heartily recommend this book especially as a gift; I would have been dead pleased to get a copy in my Christmas stocking.
—Jim Murdoch, The Truth About Lies
 
I can’t really express how much I enjoyed this book. I love experimental storytelling, and I love spiraling interconnected narratives. You definitely get both in this book, from traditional tales of woe and hope, to Aesop’s fable styled flash fiction, but no matter the technique, the writing is uncomplicated and yet extraordinarily aware of its surroundings. The stories are crafted so subtly that even the most interpretive reader will find them thought-provoking and challenging.
—Cheryl Anne Gardner, POD People
 
This poignant collection of interwoven short stories yearns for true interconnectedness even while expressing the intense lone-liness inherent to human individuality…. This is a beautifully written, thoughtful collection well worth reading.
—Cheri Crenshaw, Fearless Reviews

Subtlety ought to be on an endangered literary species list, but Brent Robison brilliantly makes the case for its essentiality in this exquisite collection of webbed stories. These stories argue that everything is a facet of the same jewel and we touch each other's lives in unfathomable ways. To read them is to heighten one's bond with strangers.
—Djelloul Marbrook, award-winning poet/novelist, Far from Algiers, The Light Piercing Water Trilogy

Rich, layered images take us deep inside the lives of Robison's characters, their stories weaving together a tapestry as textured as it is beautiful. Brent Robison's stories are reminiscent of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio – stories of ordinary people caught in the crosshairs of circumstance, sometimes of their own making, sometimes not. All of them heroic in their honest struggle to find meaning and ultimately love.... A gorgeous, timeless collection about longing.
—Susan Richards, NY Times bestselling author, Chosen by a Horse, Saddled, Chosen Forever

The Principle of Ultimate Indivisibility is a collection of linked short stories, and each one of them is a delight: a sparsely-written, surprising delight which illuminates unexpected corners of its characters’ lives and in so doing, reveals their obsessions, loves and longings with ruthless clarity.
—Jane Smith, The Self-Publishing Review

It’s a feast of food for thought, a richly imagined reality that looks much like our own would if we could really see it. Robison has a lyrical and evocative style and a deep affection for human foibles, and wandering through the maze he has woven is oddly intoxicating.
—Anne Pyburn Craig, Chronogram magazine

It's a great first book…. Some of the stories rise to memorable slices of life, and the overall breadth of the characters engaged, and the types of experience worked through, show a true humanist's heart at work. Moreover, the use of a fractured story structure, where characters, actions and similar reactions come together over time, lend the overall work the tragic air of great epics, with people doing all they can to escape fate's plans for them; and yet also the bittersweet quality we recognize in the best comedies, where folks keep pressing on, no matter what pushes them back.
—Paul Smart, The Woodstock Times

If you’re looking for intelligent, grown-up, philosophical, short literary fiction then I can heartily recommend this book especially as a gift; I would have been dead pleased to get a copy in my Christmas stocking.
—Jim Murdoch, The Truth About Lies

I can’t really express how much I enjoyed this book. I love experimental storytelling, and I love spiraling interconnected narratives. You definitely get both in this book, from traditional tales of woe and hope, to Aesop’s fable styled flash fiction, but no matter the technique, the writing is uncomplicated and yet extraordinarily aware of its surroundings. The stories are crafted so subtly that even the most interpretive reader will find them thought-provoking and challenging.
—Cheryl Anne Gardner, POD People

This poignant collection of interwoven short stories yearns for true interconnectedness even while expressing the intense lone-liness inherent to human individuality…. This is a beautifully written, thoughtful collection well worth reading.
—Cheri Crenshaw, Fearless Reviews

Hear excerpts and discussions on The Strange Recital podcast

A Confession of Love and Emptiness

confession-pic-1-300x300

Signs

signs pic3

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_Indivisibility
Brent_Indivisibility

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.

Jesus' Son

by Denis Johnson

Published by Harper Perennial 1992

"What can I say? A hallucinatory journey through a grimy American underbelly, in which language itself provides heart, truth, and unexpected beauty."