The Law of Strings: and Other Stories [Kindle-editie] beoordelingen het boek quotes

The Law of Strings and Other Stories is an existential yelp examining individual choices and our all-too-human response to unexpected events. Fans of George Saunders and Aimee Bender will delight in Gillis’ surprising surrealist twists in the heart of painfully real emotion and interpersonal relationships. From a tightrope walker abandoning his trade to an Immovable Girl learning to levitate, The Law of Strings explores what happens at the crossroads in our lives and how we decide what matters most in a world defined by chaos. Gillis says he approaches short stories in “rapid succession” and “always follows [his] gut.” For this lawyer turned publisher turned writer, gutsy risk-taking is at the core of his personality and spills into the lives of his characters, who frequently make decisions with shattering consequences. Perhaps it’s this penchant for disastrous choices that make the bizarre, dream-like worlds in which these characters live seem so familiar. Then again, it could be the raw human emotion that leaps off the page as you devour these stories in one satisfying sitting. "[T]his story collection hooked me from story one and continued to captivate to the end. Expert dialog and movement and resolution in each piece...This is a book you could read in a sitting or two. The pace is that swift; the stories are that good."—STEPHEN DIXON, two-time National Book Award finalist “Very few writers would dare explore, in a collection of stories, the intersections between quantum physics and everyday ethics, between cosmic law and domestic habit; fewer still could make those intersections so compelling and surreal and surprising, and could make the pages sing by so quickly; only Steven Gillis can provide just this bracing combination of thoughtfulness and spiked wit and deadpan finesse. The Law of Strings is a revelation—strange, barbed, and original.”—MICHAEL GRIFFITH, author of the novels Trophy, Bibliophilia and Spikes