Fan-favorite novelist Eckhard Gerdes is back, and this time with both barrels loaded! These two novels tackle modern life's complexities as only the twelve-gauge pen of Eckhard Gerdes can. The Unwelcome Guest is the story of one man's flight from paranoia, and Nin & Nan features a gender-ambiguous couple who take on the entire federal government. Both novels are richly humorous, but at the core of each is the pressing concern that modern concerns are pressing on us too much. Twice a top-ten finisher in the Preditors and Editors annual readers' poll of the best novels of the year, Gerdes is certain to delight his legion of loyal literati with his legendary legerdemain in this new double offering . Sit down, relax, and take off your socks-you'd laugh them off anyway as you read The Unwelcome Guest and Nin and Nan.
The Unwelcome Guest plus Nin and Nan
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Review
Gerdes's latest, The Unwelcome Guest plus Nin and Nan is an admirable and charming addition to Gerdes's ongoing experiment.
--Mark Axelrod, The Review of Contemporary Fiction
--Mark Axelrod, The Review of Contemporary Fiction
About the Author
Eckhard Gerdes is the editor of The Journal of Experimental Fiction, an occasional publication dedicated to the furthering of forefront fiction. He has published criticism in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, American Review of Books, Electronic Book Review, and other magazines. His fiction has appeared in Fiction International, Notre Dame Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, Golden Handcuffs Review, Coe Review, Oyez Review, Rampike, and in many other fine magazines and journals. Gerdes's previous novel, My Landlady the Lobotomist, was a top five finisher in the 2009 Preditors and Editors Readers Poll and was nominated for the 2009 Wonderland Book Award for Best Novel of the Year. His The Million-Year Centipede was selected as one of the top ten mainstream novels of 2007 in the Preditors and Editors Readers Poll and was nominated for the 2008 Wonderland Award. He has twice been the recipient of the Richard Pike Bissell Creative Writing Award for excerpts from Przewalski's Horse, has also been a finalist for both the Starcherone and the Blatt fiction prizes for his unpublished manuscript White Bungalows, and for Cistern Tawdry he was nominated for the Georgia Author of the Year Award in the Fiction Category. He lives near Chicago and has three sons, to whom this new book is proudly dedicated.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
The Unwelcome Guest is a paranoid narrative, transverse, moving like a wave from left to right and across in a circle as black marks on a page, with ample oscillations in its dynamic telling. What is framed in these short eighty pages is a search for meaning. Lubjec is the narrator's foil. Evil twin. Yin to his Yang. Is it stream of conscious? Yes, and intelligently constructed. It is also discursive, using diagrams, sketches, cartoonish doodles and word play to usurp the narrative and frame it in fresh context. It's no wonder Gerdes chose to include Nin and Nan in this double novella as The Unwelcome Guest lays solid groundwork for their sensational world.
Nin and Nan is a fascinating journey into a bizarro world where Bush Jr. is the supreme leader of a not so unrecognizable United States. The Ralph Bakshi-esque world Nin and Nan inhabit mirrors our own. A carnival of events take Nin and Nan from their unassuming hill where their only wish is to keep billboard advertisements from obscuring their view all the way to a consumer driven government building fashioned after the Pentagon. Gerdes brilliant writing moves the narrative along at a smart clip and the humor is a cogent reminder of post-911 America.
Nin and Nan is a fascinating journey into a bizarro world where Bush Jr. is the supreme leader of a not so unrecognizable United States. The Ralph Bakshi-esque world Nin and Nan inhabit mirrors our own. A carnival of events take Nin and Nan from their unassuming hill where their only wish is to keep billboard advertisements from obscuring their view all the way to a consumer driven government building fashioned after the Pentagon. Gerdes brilliant writing moves the narrative along at a smart clip and the humor is a cogent reminder of post-911 America.
3 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
A review by Dr. Joseph Suglia
THE UNWELCOME GUEST and NIN AND NAN (2010) by Eckhard Gerdes
The name Eckhard Gerdes is often bound to the term "bizarro fiction." This is an intellectual error, as I will attempt to explain.
A "bizarro" is a self-published fiction writer who pays very little attention to language. S/he has no literary background, is generally undereducated and semiliterate, "reads" comic books, plays video games, and emulates the cinema of David Lynch and Takashi Miike. (The bizarros are ignorant of the fact that Lynch created films not out of the hunger to be "weird"--at least before he succumbed to his internet fan base and produced the self-parodic INLAND EMPIRE--but on the basis of an original experience. His films were never intended to be "strange." They were attempted exteriorizations of dreams.) You will never hear a bizarro intone the names Jan Svankmajer or Fernando Arrabal ("Who?"). Nor will you listen to them twittering over the work of any serious literary artist. I doubt any one of them has ever penetrated the oeuvre of Jose Donoso or Rafael Sanchez Ferlosio ("Who?"). Perhaps after reading this review, they will.
Bizarro cannot be accurately described as a literary movement, since it is neither literary nor a movement, precisely understood. The bizarros write for one another; the primary readers of bizarro fiction are other bizarro writers. This, among other things, makes bizarro more of a cult than a movement. The word "movement" is too grand, too historic in its connotations to be applied to the bizarros.
The bizarros are enjoined to write about things they consider, by mutual agreement, strange, peculiar, curious (though they do not use these words).... Read more ›
THE UNWELCOME GUEST and NIN AND NAN (2010) by Eckhard Gerdes
The name Eckhard Gerdes is often bound to the term "bizarro fiction." This is an intellectual error, as I will attempt to explain.
A "bizarro" is a self-published fiction writer who pays very little attention to language. S/he has no literary background, is generally undereducated and semiliterate, "reads" comic books, plays video games, and emulates the cinema of David Lynch and Takashi Miike. (The bizarros are ignorant of the fact that Lynch created films not out of the hunger to be "weird"--at least before he succumbed to his internet fan base and produced the self-parodic INLAND EMPIRE--but on the basis of an original experience. His films were never intended to be "strange." They were attempted exteriorizations of dreams.) You will never hear a bizarro intone the names Jan Svankmajer or Fernando Arrabal ("Who?"). Nor will you listen to them twittering over the work of any serious literary artist. I doubt any one of them has ever penetrated the oeuvre of Jose Donoso or Rafael Sanchez Ferlosio ("Who?"). Perhaps after reading this review, they will.
Bizarro cannot be accurately described as a literary movement, since it is neither literary nor a movement, precisely understood. The bizarros write for one another; the primary readers of bizarro fiction are other bizarro writers. This, among other things, makes bizarro more of a cult than a movement. The word "movement" is too grand, too historic in its connotations to be applied to the bizarros.
The bizarros are enjoined to write about things they consider, by mutual agreement, strange, peculiar, curious (though they do not use these words).... Read more ›
