Praise for Babel:
"Babel is a collection of stories full of characters who are both comic and tragic. Blackwell’s syntax is precise and astounding in the way it builds and unfolds sentence by sentence with a sort of magic one sees in Borges or Nabokov. I think he is a startlingly original writer and deserves ranking among the great stylists."
-Brandon Hobson, author of The Removed
"Imagine Thomas Bernhard and Roberto Bolano riding the Coney Island Cyclone, and you have a hint of the pleasures that await in Babel. Gabriel Blackwell’s narrators face disappearing family members, vanishing book pages, all in all, the instability of life as they knew it, but in the face of these often comic calamities, the stories resist and subvert neat categories or solutions. Babel is a collection of masterful parables, invented confessions, essays, and convergences for the current moment. Whether a moral about Moreau (as in the island of) and Morel (as in the invention of) or the evaporation of language itself, these stories both critique and illuminate."
-Susan Daitch, author of The Lost Civilization of Suolucidir
"Weird stories in the high literary tradition, reborn into the families and relationships of modern America, and shocked to life with humor and real feeling."
-Ben Loory, author of Tales of Falling and Flying
"A delightful Davenportian, Lynchian, Borgesian experience. The most impressive book of short fiction I’ve read in some time."
-Greg Gerke, author of See What I See
"it is as if the stories as a whole have indeed exited, if not language itself, then through a hole in the conventional representation of "reality" in literary language, emerging into "undreamt daydreams" (or nightmares) that Blackwell has obligingly gone ahead and dreamt for us."
-Daniel Green, Long Story Short
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Buy it now from Splice (in the UK).
Buy it from Bookshop.org (in the US).
Buy a signed copy (in the US).
"Babel is a collection of stories full of characters who are both comic and tragic. Blackwell’s syntax is precise and astounding in the way it builds and unfolds sentence by sentence with a sort of magic one sees in Borges or Nabokov. I think he is a startlingly original writer and deserves ranking among the great stylists."
-Brandon Hobson, author of The Removed
"Imagine Thomas Bernhard and Roberto Bolano riding the Coney Island Cyclone, and you have a hint of the pleasures that await in Babel. Gabriel Blackwell’s narrators face disappearing family members, vanishing book pages, all in all, the instability of life as they knew it, but in the face of these often comic calamities, the stories resist and subvert neat categories or solutions. Babel is a collection of masterful parables, invented confessions, essays, and convergences for the current moment. Whether a moral about Moreau (as in the island of) and Morel (as in the invention of) or the evaporation of language itself, these stories both critique and illuminate."
-Susan Daitch, author of The Lost Civilization of Suolucidir
"Weird stories in the high literary tradition, reborn into the families and relationships of modern America, and shocked to life with humor and real feeling."
-Ben Loory, author of Tales of Falling and Flying
"A delightful Davenportian, Lynchian, Borgesian experience. The most impressive book of short fiction I’ve read in some time."
-Greg Gerke, author of See What I See
"it is as if the stories as a whole have indeed exited, if not language itself, then through a hole in the conventional representation of "reality" in literary language, emerging into "undreamt daydreams" (or nightmares) that Blackwell has obligingly gone ahead and dreamt for us."
-Daniel Green, Long Story Short
*
Buy it now from Splice (in the UK).
Buy it from Bookshop.org (in the US).
Buy a signed copy (in the US).