This diverse book of linked stories is filled with off-centre characters and their flaws and burdens. Read about a one-armed baseball player, anosmiatics, a colour blind photographer, a time pusher an
This diverse book of linked stories is filled with off-centre characters and their flaws and burdens. Read about a one-armed baseball player, anosmiatics, a colour blind photographer, a time pusher and his best customer, intruders, the grape-picking diaspora, the whippet police, tree planters lost in the slash, a one-handed mechanic with a reputation to uphold, and many more. Also contained in this collection are the definitive 'How-To' guide to building a wall and tales of writers getting real jobs (William Faulkner drives a cab, Mikhail Bakhtin becomes a clown). With a craftsman's skill, Brown moves from hilarity to foreboding, often within a single page.
Andy Brown is the co-editor of You & Your Bright Ideas: New Montreal Writing (Véhicule Press) and Running with Scissors (Cumulus Press). He is a contributing editor for Matrix magazine and the founder of conundrum press.
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"Andy Brown's first collection of stories converges on the discarded: rooms are provisional, existing until a stranger comes to the door and leaves with the balance of the fiction in tow. What courses through his veins are imagined histories, parallel worlds into which the reader might follow, pushing aside the curtain of a familiar photo booth to enter a world of the inexplicable, where time is the drug of choice."
— Anne Stone
"I Can See You Being Invisible is a fine example of the kind of 'underground,' or even 'gutter' writing coming out of Canada. It has a stories about tree planters. It has stories where guns go off. It includes the word depanneur. It's a kind of generational portrait....Brown's writing is not the same old same old. His is a voice struggling to articulate uniqueness."
— The Danforth Review, 2004
"...at the beating heart of this work of fiction are the interconnected lives of Isaak and Uzma and Antaro and Ursula, characters who seem to scrape by on the very obscurity and loneliness of their lives. The
true force of I can see you being invisible lies in the minor key dignity of its characters, told in a patient, respectable prose. At its best, the writing is shadowless."
— The Montreal Review of Books, Summer 2004
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