"Reminiscent of the work of Luis Alberto Urrea and Gabriel Garca Mrquez (Booklist), this enchanting first novelnow in paperbackwas an Original Voices feature at Borders and a Discover Great New Writers selection at Barnes &amp; Noble. Juan Rodrigo, a gravedigger in a small Andalusianvillage, hears the voices of the dead and tells their stories to the livinga job that turns out to have both rewards and dangers in a magical place where spirits and people coexist harmoniously, and where readers will linger with delight.

The Gravedigger: A Novel

Literature & Fiction

Grandbois, Peter

United States

Chronicle Books+

Poetry. Winner of the 2020 Richard Snyder Memorial Publication Prize, Selected by Indran Amirthanayagam. "Peter Grandbois' LAST NIGHT I AGED A HUNDRED YEARS takes us on a winged journey beyond ourselves to the very lip of being, where identities blend and dissolve in their quest to 'lose the small in me.' Not content to witness and record, these talismanic verses invoke deep longing, conjuring a space where 'The spirit lives between / one name and another.' Grandbois' subtle and nuanced lines bear a silence that swells into utterance. 'We are the ones' he whispers, 'who dissolve into breath from moon to mouth...' Yet, while harkening to transcendence, these poems enact a sacrament to the sublunary, 'a meditation of mud' and 'brackish/grief' where creatures of all kinds--crows, frogs, foxes, spiders, and squirrels as well as 'hawks soaring with sun-forged feathers'--attest to the dreamlike fabric of existence. Tinctured with the wisdom of Rumi and the passion of Neruda, LAST NIGHT I AGED A HUNDRED YEARS is a book to savor--night, day, and always."--Phil Brady\nBook Description\nWinner of the 2020 Richard Snyder Memorial Publication Prize, Selected by Indran Amirthanayagam.

Last Night I Aged a Hundred Years (Richard Snyder)

Poetry

Ashland Poetry Press

ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year Award Winner Finalist for Foreword’s 2011 Book of the Year Award in Literary Fiction
"[Nahoonkara]incorporates elements of historical fiction with experimental fiction, but nothing that pulls the reader out of the fictional dream." Robin Martin,Gently Read Literature
"Departing from traditional narrative form, Grandbois moves masterfully between first, second, and third persons to invite readers into a textual visualization of how individual choices affect the well-being of the community." Review of Contemporary Fiction
"Peter Grandbois is a splendid writer I intend to follow very closely.” Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize Winning author of A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain
"Vividly drawn, exquisitely crafted, Nahoonkara bespeaks not just the promise of its author, but also his undeniable power.”Laird Hunt, author of Ray of the Star
Peter Grandbois has created an original worldand peopled it with a family portrayed vividly and with intense emotion and compassion.”Sheila Kohler, O.Henry award winning author of Cracks and Becoming Jane Eyre
In the tradition of nature writers Rick Bass and Annie Dillard, award winning writer Peter Grandbois’ new novel Nahoonkara opens up an oneiric space of wonder, a place outside preconceived notions of reality and identity, a place where we are free to re-imagine ourselves.

Nahoonkara

Literary

Etruscan Press

Fiction. Pared down to the act of creation, Grandbois' DOMESTIC DISTURBANCES presents characters and situations that seem at once wholly familiar, then shift without warning, disturbing our paradigms of "reality" only to re-create that "reality" not as we wish it to be but as we fear it must be. Like the best experimental writing, Grandbois' work doesn't simply break with tradition but interrogates it. "DOMESTIC DISTURBANCES unthinks suburban flavorlessness into a series of explosive metalogical unsettlings where anything is always-already happening. These vortical singularities teach us how, were we only to learn to pay attention, we would discover ourselves living in a radically mutable world of layered surprise and wonder."—Lance Olsen

Domestic Disturbances

Humor & Satire

Subito Press

Triptych disrupts conventions of book authorship. Between two covers are three books, The Three-Legged World by Peter Grandbois, In Time by James McCorkle, and Orpheus &amp; Echo by Robert Miltner. Of course, books converse with other books, and poetry, rippling from unmeasured sound into rampant forms, is especially polyphonic. Etruscan brings these three books together because they exerted upon our editors a gravitational pull, causing the shadow of one to fall across the reading of another. Sufficient on their own, these books achieve new altitudes when aligned. Triptych launches no school. It backs no cause. What these books share is not easily labeled. None follows narrative conventions. None dwells on confession. None abides predictable meter. None is easily parsed. Each climbs eerie heights where ego finds no purchase. Each takes a kaleidoscopic view of selfhood. Each takes flight toward apotheosis. Each blesses the moments “Before we turn into air,” or give way to “tongue of trees, language of clouds,” and before “Gods and dogs begin their talking back,” before birds “are falling through their late bodies.” In Miltner’s ogham-deep caesuras, in McCorkle’s speech-song, and in Grandbois’s cadences which whisper like ghostly passersby, “sound is emanation,” and emanation asks, “what would this line be without the words?”

Triptych: The Three-Legged World, In Time, and Orpheus & Echo (Etruscan Press Trilogies)

Miltner, Robert

McCorkle, James

In The Glob Who Girdled Granville and The Secret Lives of Actors, the second in Wordcraft of Oregon's series of fabulist novellas and the second in award winning novelist Peter Grandbois' series of monster double features, we encounter perhaps the two biggest icons of '50's B Horror, The Blob and The Thing from Another World. This time around, we meet our monsters decades after the films that made them famous as they attempt to adjust to "normal" life.

The Glob Who Girdled Granville and the Secret Lives of Actors

Wordcraft of Oregon, LLC

Literary Nonfiction. Memoir. "In this hilarious and poignant tour d' force, our hero is caught in a maze of simulacra, the mirrored hallways of America gone mad. The hero's quest is to smash the mirrors around him--will his sword work? Could a guitar's chords shatter the glass with its rising duende? How can he demolish the specular artifice to find the scene of his real selves? But what is the real? And how do we get there, when there is no one to drive the car"--Eleni Sikelianos. "In Peter Grandbois' `hybrid' memoir the materials of his suburban anomie are cut apart and thrust into arresting and disturbing juxtapositions. Passages of spiky adrenalin play against a melancholic, duende-driven introspection as identity is assembled and re-assembled in a strobe-lit chamber"--Sven Birkerts.

The Arsenic Lobster: A Hybrid Memoir

Spuyten Duyvil

The history of our relationship with mental illness is the history of silence. Everything Has Become Birds is an attempt to change that. For centuries the mentally ill have either been locked up, driven out of cities and towns by whip and lash, sterilized, lobotomized, and euthanized. The catalogue of horrors rivals the worst of humanities abuses and yet comparatively little has been written about it. How often the victims were silenced, told their pain wasn't real, their illness wasn't an illness at all but demonic possession, the result of "unnatural" urges, or a fault in their character. And yet, the history of mental illness is rich with geniuses who were not allowed to talk about their illness or feared to. Scientists and artists like Sir Isaac Newton, Beethoven, Leonardo Davinci or Vincent Van Gogh. Writers and philosophers such as Frederich Nietszche, Virignia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, and Edgar Allan Poe. The poems in this book grew out of an attempt to give voice back to those who have suffered from mental illness, to allow them to speak 	about their experience in their own words then use the poems to create a dialogue that opens the reader to our shared humanity and the fact that, as the Cheshire Cat reminds us, "we're all mad here."

everything has become birds: poems

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Mental Health

Brighthorse Books

Peter Grandbois’ essay collection, Kissing the Lobster, uses the ancient samurai code of Bushido (Justice, Courage, Mercy, Courtesy, Honesty, Honor, Loyalty, and Character), then throws in a few of his own, as a lens through which to interrogate authenticity in a culture obsessed with surface and youth. The book is an ode to failure, a rallying cry for the inevitability of pain and the acceptance of loss. It is a reminder that in hiding from pain, in shying away from failure, we forget what is most essential in ourselves. 
The essays in Peter Grandbois’s Kissing the Lobster invite us to consider pain, suffering, failure and the role they play in truly knowing the self. Grandbois has the courage to go where lesser writers won’t. As relentless as the competitive fencer he is, he thrusts into the dark corners of the ego and the soul, until finally, like all good essayists, he strikes the light, and we, his willing companions stand exposed and grateful in its illumination. Always on the attack, these essays are smart and necessary. Lee Martin, author of The Mutual UFO Network
Kissing the Lobster is a compelling meditation on pain and passion, courage and character, and the inescapable creative urge. Peter Grandbois writes with searing, unflinching honesty. His crisp prose lunges, then drills you directly in the chest. Dinty W. Moore, author of Between Panic &amp; Desire
Self-awareness may be somewhat of a curse for the writer: “Sometimes I fear my entire life is made up of worrying about myself and pretending I’m not.” Grandbois writes. This self-awareness might be unpleasant for him but for the reader, it is pure joy. To see Grandbois as he en gardes and touchés as a middle aged man, cracking his own body against his dream of his youth, is to feel what it’s like to be a self-aware human—suffering, full of doubt, pointed, sharp, and funny as a sword. Nicole Walker, author of Sustainability: A Love Story

Kissing The Lobster

Spuyten Duyvil Publishing

A companion volume to Grandbois' award winning, Domestic Disturbances, this new collection of dark and disturbingly weird fictions explores the animal inside all of us. As the great Brazilian writer, Clarice Lispector said, "Being alive is inhuman."

Domestic Bestiary

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Books by Grandbois, Peter