03/30/2015
"Keene finds inspiration in newspaper clippings, memoirs, and history, and anchors them in the eternal, universal, and mystical."
"Practically every sentence in the book perforates, stretches out, or pries open literary modes designed to be airtight, restrictive, and racially exclusionary…An expert generator of suspense, Keene also turns out to be a skilled humorist, a mischievous ironist, a deft, seductive storyteller and a studied historian."
"We have become accustomed in recent years to the revisionary spirit of much postcolonial fiction, but the ambition, erudition and epic sweep of John Keene’s remarkable new collection of stories, travelling from the beginnings of modernity to modernism, place it in a class of its own. His book achieves no less than an imaginative repositioning of the history of the Americas ... Keene is that rarest of things today, a writer whose radicalism connects the politics of history to the politics of fiction."
Times Literary Supplement - Kate Webb
"Exquisite, and unlike anything I’ve ever read."
"Counternarratives proffers a series of stories in which religion and spirituality, art and language, violence and subjugation, homosexuality and eroticism, may shine through a panoply of voices."
Full Stop - Patrick Disselhorst
"Counternarratives is an extraordinary work of literature. John Keene is a dense, intricate, and magnificent writer. "
Harper's - Christine Smallwood
"Keene opens up the spaces between words and their objects, to create room where fresh meanings can play."
The Nation - Ben Ehrenreich
"Only a few, John Keene among them, in our age, authentically test the physics of fiction as both provocation and mastery. Continuing what reads like the story collection as freedom project, in Counternarratives , Keene opens swaths of history for readers to more than imagine but to manifest and live in the passionate language of conjure and ritual."
"In Counternarratives , John Keene undertakes a kind of literary counterarchaeology, a series of fictions that challenge our notion of what constitutes "real" or "accurate" history. His writing is at turns playful and erudite, lyric and coldly diagnostic, but always completely absorbing. Counternarratives could easily be compared to Borges or Bolaño, Calvino or Kiš, but at the same time it is a deeply American, resolutely contemporary book, that asks us to reconsider our own perspectives on the past—and the future."
"Queering the script, defying the imperative to be silent, however, does not require confidence or a vision of what progress means. It is, rather, in all its uncertainty and risk, the most basic stuff of—the very matter of—life. It is also the crowning achievement of one of the year’s very best books."
The Quarterly Conversation - Brad Johnson
"Keene’s collection of short and longer historical fictions are formally varied, mold-breaking, and deeply political. He’s a radical artist working in the most conservative genres, and any search for innovation in this year’s U.S. fiction should start here."
Vulture - Christian Lorentzen
"Keene’s collection of 13 stories and novellas examines lives marked by the tectonic historical pressures of its five-century scope. Jumping from Reformation-era Brazil to Puritan New England to Langston Hughes’s Harlem, it is that rare book of short fiction with an epic intuition of time, accomplishing in a handful of inspired, intimate portraits what many sagas only manage in reams."
Epic Stories That Expand the Universal Family Plot - The New York Times - Julian Lucas
"Genius – brilliant, polished and of considerable depth."
"Of the scope of William T. Vollmann or Samuel R. Delany, but with a kaleidoscopic intuition all its own, Counternarratives is very easily one of the most vividly imagined and vitally timed books of the year. I haven't felt so refreshed in quite a while as a reader."
"Protean in style, erudite in reference, uncanny in effect, these stories and novellas inhabit, conjure, and invent characters written out of history by slavery, racism, and subordination."
"Keene exerts superb control over his stories, costuming them in the style of Jorge Luis Borges…Yet he preserves the undercurrent of excitement and pathos that accompanies his characters' persecution and their groping toward freedom."
The Wall Street Journal - Sam Sacks
‘We have become accustomed in recent years to the revisionary spirit of much postcolonial fiction, but the ambition, erudition and epic sweep of John Keene’s remarkable new collection of stories, travelling from the beginnings of modernity to modernism, place it in a class of its own.’TLS
‘Counternarratives is that rare book of short fiction with an epic intuition of time, accomplishing in a handful of inspired, intimate portraits what many sagas only manage in reams.’New York Times
‘Keene’s collection of short and longer historical fictions are formally varied, mould-breaking, and deeply political. He’s a radical artist working in the most conservative genres, and any search for innovation in this year’s US fiction should start here.’Vulture
‘Exquisite, and unlike anything I’ve ever read.’On Immunity
‘Genius – brilliant, polished and of considerable depth.’Mumbo Jumbo
‘Counternarratives is an extraordinary work of literature. John Keene is a dense, intricate, and magnificent writer.’Harper’s
‘In Counternarratives , John Keene undertakes a kind of literary counterarchaeology, a series of fictions that challenge our notion of what constitutes “real” or “accurate” history. His writing is at turns playful and erudite, lyric and coldly diagnostic, but always completely absorbing. Counternarratives could easily be compared to Borges or Bolaño, Calvino or Kiš.’Your Face in Mine
‘Encompassing hundreds of fictional and historical characters over several centuries, and utilizing a mesmerizing array of styles – including slave narrative, historical document, stream of consciousness, fever dream, diary, field manual, concrete poetry – the book amasses a vision of epic capacity. In magic-like language, explores the experiences of rebel slaves and slave women, Langston Hughes and Huck Finn.’VICE
04/01/2015
2015-03-21
