Adrift in a Vanishing City [Paperback]

Vincent Czyz (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 14, 1998

Fiction. Neither a traditional collection of short stories nor a novel, ADRIFT IN A VANISHING CITY is an unguided tour through the tortured landscape of obsessive love and unreliable memory. These stories wind through the real and the imagined, linking Budapest, Berlin, Mexico City and Pittsburg, Kansas to the shadow-haunted places within the human heart. "...A small landmark in the sedimentation of new form in fiction..."-Samuel R. Delany. "ADRIFT IN A VANISHING CITY ought to come with a warning label: Herein lie levels of meaning beyond the grasp of the blissful best-seller reader. In poetic prose that flouts conventional fictive forms, Czyz draws on classical myth, fable, folklore, Shakespearean tragedy and other genres to create a metaphor of modern alienation"--Joe Castronovo.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Adrift in a Vanishing City ought to come with a warning label: Herein lie levels of meaning beyond the grasp of the blissful best-seller reader.

In poetic prose that flouts conventional fictive forms, Czyz draws on classical myth, fable, folklore, Shakespearean tragedy and other genres to create a metaphor of modern alienation.

The nine stories are set in a small, southeastern city in the coal-mining region of Kansas. -- Joe Castronovo, New Jersey Herald & News

Deeply romantic (in the best sense) and darkly evocative, Czyz's lush style explores regions well beyond simple narrative, probing the constantly shifting, oblique connections between failure, memory and the forever-incomplete nature of human desire. A moody, gorgeous and formally innovative collection, "Adrift in a Vanishing City" deserves a wide audience among readers who understand that fiction is about more than getting a character from one room to the next. -- Greg Burkman, The Seattle Times

About the Author

Born in Orange, NJ, Vincent Czyz earned his Bachelors degree in English literature at Rutgers University and studied for his Masters degree at Columbia University. He worked at the North Jersey Herald & News in Passaic, NJ for two years where he served as copy editor, book reviewer and feature writer. In 1991 he received a fellowship from the NJ Council on the Arts for his as-yet-unpublished novel, Ghost Dancer. He was again awarded a grant in 1994 for Adrift in a Vanishing City. That same year, Zee Gee and the Blue Jean Baby Queen tied with Jere Hoars The Snopes who Saved Huckaby for the Pirates Alley Faulkner Prize for Short Story. The Night Crawler was a finalist for the same prize the following year. Mr. Czyz has resided in Lyndhurst, NJ for the past ten years where he continues to find creative ways to make a living while he writes fiction.

Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Voyant Publishing; First edition. edition (October 14, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0966599802
• ISBN-13: 978-0966599800
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,873,046 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Born in Orange, NJ, Vincent Czyz is a graduate of Rutgers-New Brunswick and Columbia University. He spent three years at the North Jersey Herald News in Passaic, NJ, as copyeditor, book reviewer, and feature writer. In 1991 and again in 1994 he won fellowships from the NJ Council on the Arts for excellence in prose writing. In 1994 he also won the Faulkner Prize for Short Fiction. His collection of short stories, Adrift in a Vanishing City, was released in 1998. He spent a total of nearly a decade in Istanbul, Turkey before settling in Jersey City. His fiction has appeared in Shenandoah, AGNI, Camera Obscura, Southern Indiana Review, Louisiana Literature, Wasafiri, and the Massachusetts Review. "The Moon has Fallen into a Well" was translated into Turkish for inclusion in an anthology published in Istanbul: 'Istanbul'da Kan Var' ('There is Blood in Istanbul'). His nonfiction has been published by the Boston Review, AGNI, Westbranch, Logos Journal, Rain Taxi, and New Millennium Writings.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Underground Classic, December 7, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Adrift in a Vanishing City (Paperback)

I'd never heard of this book or the author until I got a tip by e-mail. Once you read the preface it's not hard to figure out why. The major houses turned it down although one editor called it "hot-house writing-lyrical, Joycean, experimental." This book was a little too much for their conventional, market-minded tastes. As a Kerouac connisseur whose read just about all of Jack's books, I couldn't resist checking out a contemporary writer cast out by the mainstream. The first time I read "Adrift in a Vanishing City" I was stunned. Almost as soon as I turned the last page I went back to the first and the second time through I stood back with the same amazement but a lot more understanding.

While most of the reviews dwell on the ethereal beauty of Czyz's writing, it's dream-like qualities, it's mythical feel and the collage of imagery that layer the narrative as if he were trying to use words to recreate the memory of a `small-time city' in Kansas, they seem to miss the gritty side. The characters include the town drunk, the town idiot, an ex-convict whose lines are as funny as they are obscene, a half-hearted Country Western singer who spends all of the money he hustles or earns on travel fare, a heroine addict in Paris, an Oxford-educated old man living in a squalid hotel in Mexico City and the town insomniac whose main occupation seems to be walking the streets in the early morning hours.

The writing itself, when it's not burrowing worm holes in our complacent points of view, is often concrete enough you could pave a street with it as when Czyz writes, "A light turns red in quiet enough to hear the metallic click." Or, "...the still-life of beer bottles (glossed with yellow light) and ashtray with crushed white butts (like tiny untended bones) on the table in Farley's Tavern ..." or "...I am no better off than a dead leaf, a discarded snapshot curling at the corners, swept end over end down deserted streets, the edges of cities even continents apart always the same near dawn-scattered bird twitters, shadows turning their slow pirouette into brick and stone, the same cold blue-of-drowned lips appearing in the sky ..."

When you get to the last story, a just about perfect recreation of Old Testament jargon, you'll at first be confused, wondering what this story, which apparently occurred thousands of years ago in ancient Palestine has to do with a prairie crooner and his drinking buddies. But by the time you figure it out, you also realize that the drift in these stories isn't just continental. It isn't just `galaxies sliding sideways' or drifting from lover to lover or even the drift of centuries, but has to do with another dimension entirely. Czyz is hooked in, just like Ginsberg and Kerouac were back in the fifties. "Adrift in a Vanishing City" is going to be an underground classic and in 10 years critics will be amazed that Czyz, who seems to have produced nothing in the two years since, labored in obscurity. Whatever you do, don't leave this page without buying it. And get your friends to buy it. That's how the underground works.

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A SURE BET!, April 22, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Adrift in a Vanishing City (Paperback)

Someone suggested that I read Mr. Czyz's book. I got a hold of him and asked Mr. Czyz to autograph his book for me. He wrote, "Thanks for taking a chance". There is no chance to be taken here ladies and gentlemen, this is a sure bet.

The reader is taken on a dreamlike jouney through American country and exotic locals accompanied by unforgettable characters that will linger in the memory long after many great protagonists and accompanying players of lauded novels - both old and new - have been retired to the recesses of the mind. Mr. Czyz closes a sentence better than most novelists windup a chapter. Eat it up, taste it, over and over, again and again. Adrift in a Vanishing City will never disappear in the minds and hearts of readers who do as Mr. Czyz suggests and "Take a Chance". I did and i am sure glad of it. Mr. Czyz...thanks for the magic moments.

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Like wine and drugs, "Adrift" casts a spell., June 30, 1999

By 

[e-mail] (Columbus, OH in body, the Vanishing City in spirit) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Adrift in a Vanishing City (Paperback)

As its title promises, "Adrift in a Vanishing City" is a boldly beautiful and original collection of interwoven pieces, that defies conventional classification. Its beauty, an admixture of loveliness and mystery, of sensuality and spirituality, is of the kind commonly described as "haunting". It stirs up a part of your subconscious and allows it to float to the surface where it lingers and gives that pleasure mixed with pain which is the peculiar quality of dreams, of myth and especially of memory.

Each piece evokes a different character's point of view, fusing exterior and interior landscapes, crossing continents and consciences. It is all subtlely bound together by the narrative thread of the love between Zee Gee and Blue Jean Baby Queen. If you liked "The Sound and the Fury" you will love "Adrift".

The work is so metaphorically dense, the power of suggestion so rich, that you go back and reread whole passages just to savor the sensations they evoke.

This book may never be a "best-seller" (however much it deserves to be): no glib story-telling here, no facile sentimentality. While a well-written, plot-driven, conventional page-turner may provide a wonderfully pleasurable escape, "Adrift in a Vanishing City" pulls you into another level of consciousness that is just as compelling but deeper and more enduring.