When He Sprang From His Bed, Staggered Backward, And Fell Dead, We Clung Together With Faint Hearts, And Mutely Questioned Each Other
880 Stories
Winner of the 2016 GMR Book Prize / Selected by Sarah Manguso
“Christopher Kang’s work is mysterious, lovelorn, philosophical and often very amusing. Its lyricism is matched only by its daring. A remarkable book.”
“Christopher Kang’s brilliant first book, a steady accretion of Robert Walserian feuilletons, filled me with such quick strobes of delight and confusion and dismay and envy that, in the end, I mostly felt vertigo. This book is sly; it contains its own contradictions. It is a searing indictment of artistic ambition while being nakedly ambitious; it is self-reflective without a steady self to reflect; it is simultaneously starkly clear and confounding; and its intelligence is often punctured by humor and sentiment and near-aphorisms that ring so quietly and personally that I often wanted to write them in permanent marker on my skin.”
“These tiny novels or are they prose poems or pieces of a particle theory never let their genre indeterminacy cause blurring. Vivid as sword-thrusts, stroboscopic as a fall from a sudden precipice, marvelously stark as the outline of a pride of lions on the horizon, this book, sparkling like a bag of jewels, offers us the opportunity to live many lives without all those interstitial fascia. How about a shot of tequila? How about 880?”