Unlucky Lucky Days (American Readers Series) (Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Brief, animist epiphanies—most shorter than a page—comprise Grandbois's folkloric debut. The frog of Greener Pastures dreams of becoming an architect like his father, and shapes his dung hills into replicas of churches. The blind cat in The Teacher decides on a career change, aided by an equally blind mouse. The growth on Aunt Mary's neck (The Growth) appeared as random as the decay of an isotope in an old growth forest when no one is there to hear. Absurdist and surreal, witty and ironical, Grandbois's observations make for pleasant grotesques: impressionistic idées fixes like the heads of soldiers... large enough to block passages against intruders. (June)
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Review

Audiophiles may recognize Daniel Grandbois as the bassist of some of Denver's most interesting bands, such as Tarantella and Slim Cessna's Auto Club, groups that run the gamut from gypsy to gospel to Gothic Americana. It's no surprise, then, that when he trades his four-string for a pen and paper, Grandbois takes a musical approach to fiction - with an equally sharp grasp of the absurd. The result is a melodic brand of flash fiction - two- to three-paragraph stories that could be called prose poems - that blends the rhythm and meter of music with the narrative thrust of fiction. The quirkiness of his music carries onto the page as well, for in Grandbois' surreal world a chair or a termite is as likely a protagonist as a person... Unlucky Lucky Days is like a peyote trip in the desert - things seem familiar, but different. If you really immerse yourself in these stories, you might find yourself questioning whether Grandbois' cracked perception just might be right. --Vince Darcangelo -- Rocky Mountain News, July 4, 2008

Brief, animist epiphanies--most shorter than a page--comprise Grandbois's folkloric debut. The frog of "Greener Pastures" dreams of becoming an architect like his father, and shapes his dung hills into replicas of churches. The blind cat in "The Teacher" decides on a career change, aided by an equally blind mouse. The growth on Aunt Mary's neck ("The Growth") appeared "as random as the decay of an isotope in an old growth forest when no one is there to hear." Absurdist and surreal, witty and ironical, Grandbois's observations make for pleasant grotesques: impressionistic idées fixes "like the heads of soldiers... large enough to block passages against intruders." -- Publishers Weekly, April 7, 2008

Daniel Grandbois's stories in Unlucky Lucky Days are tiny and explosive, like a violent series of sneezes. Two techniques are key to Grandbois's style. First, he is unabashedly a comic writer. This is avant-garde stand-up, right down to the punch lines flashing and fritzing like short-circuited bulbs at the end of his paragraphs. `Did you know that cranberries got their name from cranes? A crane without an ear named them so. It cut the letter e off the word because e stands for ear. That one could fly quite well. Unfortunately, it could only hear in circles.' Respect is due to a writer who plays the buffoon in a field like flash fiction, which is so often icicle-cold and-sharp, with the occasional brittle, bleak frost laid on for texture. And as the humor in these pieces gets hokier, the possible parallels with the American folktale tradition become more suggestive and sophisticated. The second marked tendency in Grandbois's work is that his love-hate affair with abstraction drives him to anthropomorphize everything from animals to inanimate objects to body parts to actions to cerebral immaterialities. A typical character in one of these stories is the urge. `Forty days and nights later, the urge left the clouds. It landed on a stone, which was grateful, as it had never had much of an urge to do anything.' Or the sound. `There was once a sound that made a nest of the hairs in some woman's ear.' Or the finger. `Skidding beneath the bed, the lost appendage withered and curled. It lay dormant forty years before the now old woman looked down there. The finger beckoned her under and struck like a snake.' Or the Chinese finger trap. `The scattered straw had had enough of the elephant foot's pranks. It wove itself into a large-scale Chinese finger trap and waited, crouching.' Other protagonists: the mirror, the drapery, the nose, the left hand, the sea squirt, the hair, the chair, the singing.

--Micaela Morrissette -- Jacket Magazine, March 08

The stories of Unlucky Lucky Days are the kind grown-up readers have probably forgotten how to enjoy. Part fable, part creation myth, these seventy-three whimsical tales by Daniel Grandbois are bedtime stories at their best.

Grandbois has the difficult task of jogging his audience's memory, re-teaching them what was once second nature: wonder (otherwise known as a suspension of disbelief). The first story, "The Yarn," sets readers up for rethinking their adult expectations of fiction. The protagonist, a ball of yarn, is detained by a violin spider. "The yarn stopped itself in its tracks and laid itself out, as that is how yarns tell their tales." Many of these pieces are similarly aware of how mischievous they are, of what fun they are having.

Yarn is not the only inanimate object to play a leading role. Other characters include a stain, a snowman, body parts, and even wads of gum. Animals are also common, including a giraffe named Happy Birthday Grandma. This world is nearly devoid of men and women. As the speaker cautions in "Sunny Side Up," "Cages don't always mean humans, especially in stories in which there are none." Of course, the creatures caging themselves seem to be warnings for people too comfortable in their houses.

Elsewhere in this collection, the moral is not so evident. Unlike traditional parables in which the meaning is obvious--be kind to your neighbors or never trust a crocodile--these stories conclude with riddles rather than platitudes. The moral, or just as likely, the punch line, is out of reach. The result is stories that never condescend and always delight, as if making sense is overrated, a bad adult habit.

Unlucky Lucky Days is not the only recent demonstration of Grandbois' imagination. His book The Hermaphrodite (An Hallucinated Memoir), to be released by Green Integer this fall, includes forty original woodcuts by Argentine printmaker Alfredo Benavidez Bedoya. This collaboration shares both the whimsy and the precision evident in Unlucky Lucky Days. Despite the tangential quality of these stories, they are never intentionally tricksy, but rather true to a world in which mustachioed spiders are made king and spin hammocks instead of webs. (June)

--Erica Wright -- ForeWord Magazine, March/April 08

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Product Details

• Paperback: 128 pages
• Publisher: BOA Editions Ltd. (June 1, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1934414107
• ISBN-13: 978-1934414101
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.2 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #399,569 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Acid Trip in Words, October 21, 2008

By	M. Grierson - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Um... WOW. Something tells me that this author LOVES mushrooms... and I'm not talking about the saran-wrapped, grocery store variety, either. HAHAHA Honestly, I LOVED this book. It's the most intelligent, unique thing I've read in a long time. But yes... it's pretty much an acid trip in words.

Grandbois has been compared to Dr. Seuss, but I don't think that's quite right. They share creativity, to be certain, but Seuss is much more structured and "sensical." Reading this book was more like analyzing a Salvador Dali painting of indoor clouds or melting clocks. It is pure surrealism in the written form--which I didn't think was even POSSIBLE, so I gotta give some serious kudos.

So will YOU like it? I've come up with a three question quiz to help you determine if you will:

#1 Do you use the word "weird" as a compliment? (personally, I inherently LOVE things that are weird, so it's about the nicest adjective I know).

#2 When you wake up from a truly Alice-in-Wonderland-type dream, do you wish it was ACTUALLY REAL just because of its super-freaky awesomeness?

#3 Women--have you ever worn fairy wings in public, not as part of a Halloween costume? (Or men--have you ever wondered what it was like to be a stapler?)

If you've answered yes to at least two of these questions, CHECK THIS BOOK OUT. I really can't explain what it's like in words, so I'll include a complete chapter for you to analyze at your own discretion. Here it is:

"THE NEWSPAPER

"Having been read only once, the usual story, the small-town newspaper was stuffed into a cereal box, slated for the can. It tried to strike up a conversation, but the box couldn't read, no matter the words splattered all over it.

"Ah, but, miracle of miracles, the paper was retrieved. It shouted for joy, something it very rarely did, which sounded like this:!. But then the newspaper was separated into three pages and folded and creased in unnatural places.

"It became a hat, an airplane, and a sailboat.

"'Look at me,' said the hat, perched high on the bald man's head, greedily soaking up the sweat.

"'What about meeeeeeeeeeee?' asked the airplane, soaring through the dining room. It had borrowed several e's from different places to ask such a question, as no respectable paper was going to print more than two in a row. With an anticlimactic crinkle, the airplane crashed to the floor.

"For no apparent reason, the plane and hat were gathered and lit on fire.

"Carrying the news, the boat set sail down a gutter but took on too much water and was soon despondent in the sewer, where the rats, to its horror, could read."

5.0 out of 5 stars Fantastic, absurd short stories told in a great minimalist style, April 2, 2009

By	Ken Wohlrob (Brooklyn, NY) - See all my reviews

I was on vacation in San Francisco recently and one of the necessary items on my to-do list was a pilgrimage to City Lights Books. While perusing the shelves, I spied a signed copy of Daniel Granbois' Unlucky Lucky Days. Knowing the man's name and having heard great things about him from trustworthy people, I decided to plunk down some hard-earned cash.

Grandbois gave me my money's worth. Even though it is a slim book at 117 pages, Unlucky Lucky Days is packed with 73 short tales. The longest maxes out at three pages, the shortest three sentences. Each one shows a writer so comfortable in his own skin, that he appears flawless at times. Granbois plays around with characters and prose in unique and inventive ways, creating his own genre of absurdist fiction populated with dead (or soon to be dying) humans, living everyday objects, and sentient wild creatures. There are mirrors that long for a different perspective, revenge-seeking middle fingers, and storytelling balls of yarn, all of whom live and breathe as much as any of the human characters in the book.

The best pieces - "The Note," "The Yarn," "The Tunnel," and "Almost Borges" -- are more serious in tone, but show great heart and Granbois' adeptness at creating deep, robust stories with very minimalist prose. That is not to detract from the lighter tales such as "Toothpaste, "The Finger," "Three Wise Men," and "Svevo," which showcase the author's dry sense of humor perfectly. And even the stories that don't hit with as much impact (every reader will have their own favorites) still draw you into the strange world of the tale, sometimes in three paragraphs or less.

It was while perusing the book in City Lights, that I stumbled on to "The Note" and read the first paragraph:

"A note was pinned to a man in his coffin. It said, `I only seem dead.' The man's sister had pinned it there, as she'd pinned it to his pajamas before bed each night -- so afraid was he of being buried alive.

With her help, he'd escaped that dreadful fate.

She, however, did not."

That is all of five sentences and yet it speaks volumes about the characters. I was hooked. Everything that followed, on the flight home, and the subway rides to work, did not disappoint either.

It's not often you get to read stories by a writer who can take his work seriously, but seems to be having so much fun with the stories. Completely brilliant.

5.0 out of 5 stars Superb miniatures, with delights, depths, & shapeliness., November 5, 2008

By	John Domini (Des Moines, IA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

UNLUCKY LUCKY DAYS, a debut assortment, is fabulist flash-fic of the highest order. Nothing in the book runs so long as three full pages, & in general the work eludes the social & economic demarcations of what we like call "realism." Instead it offers disturbing yet charming shards of unbridled imagination. In a typical metamorphosis, a brass lion's-head knocker takes leave of its doorway, setting off to play middle-school pranks. All told, the collection divvies 73 surreal miniatures among seven sections labeled, as if Grandbois were a good Judeo-Christian, "Sunday" through "Saturday." Yet the sensibility comes across as pagan; spirits reanimate the world's common clay. He can be gloomy, suggesting for instance the nightmare morning of 9/11, or he can be healing, turning the Inferno into a Tunnel of Love. Indeed, inspired reversals at the last minute distinguish nearly all these abrupt dream-loops, now childlike, now chilling. These DAYS can create a climactic rush via a well-worked lack of commas & they can arrive at ironies that supply rightness and closure. At their best, they push cross-cutting valences to peak intensity, then leave us gasping. Now, on occasion, there emerges a world we recognize. "Hat and Rack" might have to do with sexual secrecy (the final word is "closet"), and "The Sea Squirt" might make an environmental argument. But even when the stories lack such grounding, the writer negotiates the shoals of cuteness -- the obvious danger here -- masterfully. He may work with signifying wads of gum or, repeatedly, with articulate spiders, yet he nearly always strikes a balance between the ticklish and the haunting. Those wads of gum mutate into the Weird Sisters of Macbeth (indeed, this text is rife with others, everyone from Borges to Bob Dylan) & in the end they achieve the timelessness of geometry.