Nothing in the World [Perfect Paperback]

Roy Kesey (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 21, 2007

Winner of the Bullfight Little Book Prize, Nothing in the World received unanimously great reviews, and sold out its original 2006 printing in just a few months. Dzanc Books is excited to bring this remarkable work back into print.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Nothing in the World is a mesmerizing tale of expulsion and return: this is as much a trance as a story. Roy Kesey is a fearless and very welcome new writer." --Anthony Doerr

"In haunting, evocative prose, Roy Kesey captures the horrors of war, the insanity of genocide, as well as the fleeting joys of love. Nothing in the World is a memorable debut." --Laila Lalami

"Kesey has created a quietly brilliant protest against war, an exquisitely rendered tale in the absurdist spirit of such classics as Slaughterhouse-Five and Catch-22." --Daniel Olivas, The El Paso Times

"I'm still buzzing from Roy Kesey's prize-winning novella, Nothing in the World. I'm always impressed at how he can inhabit fictional worlds that appear to be far from his own experience." --Phillip Graham, National Book Critics Circle

"It's gruesome and harrowing and funny and sad, and you should get yourself a copy right freaking now." --Pasha Malla, The Morning News

A beautiful, powerful book: mythic, vivid, heart-rending. Kesey reminds us anew of how much power there is in an open heart and the simple declarative sentence. He also reminds us that war is a viral madness, infecting everyone it touches. --George Saunders, author of In Persuasion Nation and five other titles

Roy Kesey s Nothing in the World is as horrific and convincing as a nightmare. At its best it resembles the fever visions of Cormac McCarthy s Child of God or Denis Johnson s Jesus Son. In telling the story of one young man caught up in the disintegration of Yugoslavia, Kesey has written a story that pushes us beyond war and strife. Instead, we are taken on a morally shattering forced march to the limits of human endurance itself. It is beautiful, brave, and I will not soon forget it. --Tom Bissell, author of The Father of All Things and two other titles

Roy Kesey is a natural story-teller, like the other Kesey, but writes about a wider world. This journey from an idyllic Croatian island life into the landscape of war is reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy s Blood Meridian everything is taken away, and all that is terrifying is beautiful but Kesey s writing also has the moral and figurative power of fairly tale. Nothing In The World will surprise you by how big it is. --David Vann, author of A Mile Down

About the Author

Roy Kesey's other books include his recent debut novel Pacazo, a historical guide to the Chinese city of Nanjing, and a short story collection called All Over, which made The L Magazine's recent "Best Books of the Decade" list. His short stories, essays and poems have appeared in more than eighty magazines, including McSweeney's, Subtropics, Ninth Letter and The Kenyon Review. Among other awards, his work has won a Pushcart Prize Special Mention and the 2008 Missouri Review Editors' Prize in Fiction, and has appeared in several anthologies including Best American Short Stories, The Robert Olen Butler Prize Anthology and New Sudden Fiction. He is the recipient of a 2010 prose fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He currently lives in Peru with his wife and children.

Product Details

• Perfect Paperback: 80 pages
• Publisher: Dzanc Books (August 21, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0979312329
• ISBN-13: 978-0979312328
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 0.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,161,445 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Roy Kesey's books include his debut novel Pacazo, the award-winning novella Nothing in the World, a historical guide to the Chinese city of Nanjing, and a short story collection called All Over, which made The L Magazine's recent "Best Books of the Decade" list. His short stories, essays and poems have appeared in more than eighty magazines, including McSweeney's, Subtropics, Ninth Letter and The Kenyon Review. Among other awards, his work has won a Pushcart Prize Special Mention and the 2008 Missouri Review Editors' Prize in Fiction, and has appeared in several anthologies including Best American Short Stories, The Robert Olen Butler Prize Anthology and New Sudden Fiction. He is the recipient of a 2010 prose fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He currently lives in Peru with his wife and family.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars NOTHING IN THE WORLD by Roy Kesey, June 6, 2006

By 

Alicia Gifford "girl writer" (Southern California, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Nothing in the World (Paperback)

From the first page NOTHING IN THE WORLD grabs the reader and inflicts its grand dilemma of not being able to put the book down yet never wanting for it to end.

At the top, NITW is a soldier's story, Josko's story, a Croatian boy in a blind-leading-the-blind army defending itself against the Serbs. It's a story of war and its horrors, but at its true and large heart, it's a story of the human spirit, the struggle to cope with that which can not be coped with; the mind, the will to survive and prevail, and the things that galvanize that will, in Josko's case, a mysterious siren song and an idealized and vaguely incestuous passion for Klara, Josko's older sister, married and living in Dubrovnik.

Kesey has given us a complex and unflinching character in Josko Banovic, and, as a reader, you breathe the same air as every character in this novella, hear the lugging of their hearts along with your own. The setting is vividly imagistic and Kesey's prose is beautifully tight and precise, the pace, intense. What's unsaid resonates as vibrantly as what's on the page. Bleak fables lace the text; their grim and true lessons yield no false hope. Yet, for all its brutal truth, there is hope here, and jubilation in what heroism really is--flawed, often not pretty, atrocious, even. Josko Banovic haunts you, and you continue to hope for him long after the last page has been turned.

Roy Kesey's novella is deserving of huge attention and celebration that literary fiction can punch and jab at all levels; that it can rock, that it can roll; that literary fiction is alive and well and necessary to feed what is human in us (and props to Bullfight Media and all the small presses that believe in art's sake). It's not to be missed.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a gem, December 30, 2006

By 

Richard Lewis (Denpasar, Bali Indonesia) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Nothing in the World (Paperback)

I read this novella in one sitting last week, but the emotional resonance is still vibrating. A simple and yet powerful tale, the power greater yet because Kesey restrains it, shapes it, masters it as he tells the story of a Croatian soldier and hero who, wounded and taken for a deserter, wanders deeper and deeper into a hellish kind of dreamscape disguised as reality. It's on par with "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" (even if it was the movie I saw) and "The Old Man and the Sea." It's a shame that literature of this quality gets drowned out by the dross.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A great, compelling read., October 8, 2006

By 

Mary Akers (Western NY United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Nothing in the World (Paperback)

NOTHING IN THE WORLD lures you in as you read. The first paragraph is lovely, placing the reader solidly in Josko Banovic's world which manages to feel both familiar and exotic, no small feat given that his homeland is Croatia.

Kesey's attention to detail is consistent throughout the book, which is mesmerizing, even when Josko's world becomes darker and more violent, or perhaps especially when his world becomes darker and more violent (for this is when Kesey's matter-of-fact, detailed style really grabs you by the throat).

Josko becomes a legend in his own country (albeit unknown to him)--a celebrated war hero. The trouble is, as Josko moves through the countryside alone, becoming more dirty and disheveled (also crazed by the haunting female voice that sings in his head, pulling him along siren-like) he looks less and less like a war hero and he is repeatedly shot at, beaten, even arrested and imprisoned.

In prison, in an utterly painful and ironic scene, the soldiers brutally beat him because when they demand to know his name, he tells them he is Josko Banovic. "Of course you are," says the soldier, "and I am Marshall Tito." They kick him because he claims to be a man they have made into legend, a famous hero. We know he is Josko, he knows he is, and yet the soldiers may just kill him for telling the truth which they are certain is a lie.

That sense of tragic unfairness permeates NOTHING IN THE WORLD, and aptly so, given that it is a novella that has the fighting between Serbs and Croats as its backdrop. The writing is intelligent, the story is gripping and dark but also funny and redemptive in places, and the ending is perfect. NOTHING IN THE WORLD is a great read.