Though H. P. Lovecraft is famed mostly for the influential body of short fiction he left behind, he was also one of the most prolific correspondents of his time, the author of more than 100,000 letters. Undiscovered and unpublished until now, The Natural Dissolution of Fleeting-Improvised-Men is the last letter that Lovecraft wrote, finishing it just days before his death on March 15, 1937. This edition features extensive notes from the editor, Gabriel Blackwell.

The Natural Dissolution of Fleeting-Improvised-Men: The Last Letter of H. P. Lovecraft

Literature & Fiction

Blackwell, Gabriel

Literary

Independently published

Fiction. Literary Nonfiction. Gabriel Blackwell's CORRECTION is a book of recognition and reckoning, fiction in its newest form. These 101 short story-essays (what are they?) plunge out of the dizzying, devastating, truthy world of social media and into the depths of our daily lives. The result is relentlessly precise, ferociously ethical, damning, sly and essential. Blackwell is at the height of his powers as one of the most innovative prose writers working today. To this hyper-mediated world, its texts swollen with absent facts and bad intent, we offer CORRECTION. "Blackwell has created an unsettling new kind of realism in this collection of flash-point shorts. At almost every page I found myself saying, 'Well, this can't be real,' while at the same time struggling to reconcile myself with the sheer familiarity of all these humans at their absurd and befuddled worst. I, too, had clicked on some of the headlines that informed these stories, but that was not what made this book so disconcertingly familiar. Rather, what I saw in CORRECTION was what I least wanted to see there: my own self looking back out at me. Blackwell has created the strangest of mirrors: a book that crackles with the compulsive voyeurism of the internet age tempered by the lens of that most relentless of companions--the self-reflective 'I am.'"--Sarah Blackman "WTF is this book exactly? It's a compliment to the book that I can't tell if these stories are found or made and in what proportion. Reading them gave me an unsettled and jittery feeling, like I was seeing too much of our world too rapidly, and just as I get a satisfying glimpse of a life or a state of being, it turns into something else and leaves me dazzled. CORRECTION feels true and it feels like now."--Ander Monson "Cut Zola (who took the sociopolitical temperature of the times and was shrewd about people, aware of their size) with Gari Lutz who makes a sentence crackle to matter. Add work that splashes around in the apocalypse of our mutilated attention (the Internet), like Mark Doten's Trump Sky Alpha, and increase with a pure injection of something like a Yahoo! News stream where the personal, the celebrity, the horror, smacks its lips at politics--here are 101 ideas for how to write a short story without redemption because we all know where we're heading. Blackwell offers this, a series of taut windows that are mirrors that are all screens. We need new ideas about how to write stories given the window/mirror/screen/apocalypse thing and ever-new ways to hallow, hold, mutate and use attention--this helps."--Caren Beilin

CORRECTION (Open Rose)

Humor & Satire

Rescue Press

A man becomes obsessed with expanding his body, putting on weight and enlarging himself until he swallows his surroundings. Another man is imprisoned by his own reflection, a reflection that spawns countless new reflections without end. And while one man consumes the disembodied essence of his siblings, experiencing memories that aren't actually his, others lose their wives to imaginary gods or grieve the collapse of families that don't even exist. Part Borges, part Calvino, part Hieronymous Bosch, the eerie fictions of Gabriel Blackwell offer warped reflections of domestic lives in turmoil, relationships on the brink. In these funhouse mirror distortions of identity crises and lovers' disputes, entropy deforms reality and destroys the fragile bonds between people. As would-be parents struggle with the difficulties of conception, stories half-told gestate new stories within a miasma of yet more stories. As children survey the lives of their elders, dwelling on the paths not taken, they find their own identities fracturing into kaleidoscopes of unrealised possibilities. Reader, be warned: Babel does not stand on solid ground. The abyss will open beneath you and devour your world. Enter at the risk of plunging in, with nothing in the depths to break your fall.

Babel

Splice

Fiction. "Unique and compelling as the very souls they depict—from the unknown to the famous to the infamous—these stories are wildly inventive, sly, astute. There's a bit of Sir Thomas Browne (Borges, too) for the twenty-first century in these wizardly, magical narratives. The notion of 'pure reason' has rarely had a more subtle, comical, yet deeply humane alchemist at work in the great lab of fiction than Gabriel Blackwell."—Bradford Morrow"In CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON, Gabriel Blackwell bends found forms to story, repurposes history, sets mathematics and a programmer's logic to generating emotion and wonder. This is the work of a talented storyteller slyly taking the stance of a documentary filmmaker, or else of a first-rate bureaucrat, perhaps rising quickly through our Ministry of Imagination—and with each new diagram and footnote and well-made sentence the philosopher in Blackwell provides us another piece of that most illusive of proofs, a verification of our shared humanity, captured here in all its absurdity and horror and glory."—Matt Bell

Critique of Pure Reason

Noemi Press

Though H. P. Lovecraft is famed mostly for the influential body of short fiction he left behind, he was also one of the most prolific correspondents of his time, the author of more than 100,000 letters. Undiscovered and unpublished until now, The Natural Dissolution of Fleeting-Improvised-Men is the last letter that Lovecraft wrote, finishing it just days before his death on March 15, 1937. This edition features extensive notes from the editor, Gabriel Blackwell.

The Natural Dissolution of Fleeting-Improvised-Men: The Last Letter of H.P. Lovecraft

Civil Coping Mechanisms

A professor of Linguistics in a Gulf Coast college town causes an accident that destroys his marriage and sends him into a breakdown, in which he perceives that the world is falling apart with him. Even his language becomes fractured, in a parallel to the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel.

Doom Town

Zerogram Press

Cultivating Health with Herbal Medicine: The Lost Book of Natural Herbal Remedies A Holistic Approach to Wellness

Health, Fitness & Dieting

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