Unlucky Lucky Tales

Inventive, disconcerting, and hilarious, Daniel Grandbois’s present-day fables call to mind Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories as readily as they do Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics, Rikki Ducornet's Butcher's Tales, and Woody Allen's most literary writings. Braced on the shoulders of the fabulists, fantasists, flash-fictionists, absurdists, surrealists, and satirists who came before him, Daniel Grandbois dredges up impossible meanings from the mineral and plant kingdoms, as well as the animal, and serves them to us as if they were nothing more fantastic than a plate of eggs and ham.Like Zen koans, these stories playfully short-circuit the brain to bypass normal thought and open the mind to undiscovered worlds of perception. As the human organism responds inexplicably to music, to particular combination of notes of varying pitches and durations and the intervals of silence between them, so too it responds in profound yet ultimately incomprehensible ways to the absurd, twisted language of Grandbois’ poetic prose.

Daniel Grandbois is the author of the Believer Book Award Reader Survey Selection and ABA Indie Next Notable Book Unlucky Lucky Days and the art novel The Hermaphrodite: An Hallucinated Memoir, illustrated by Alfredo Benavidez Bedoya. He lives in Boulder, Colorado.

Fidel Sclavo, whose work has been featured and exhibited in many countries, was recently featured as one of Latin America’s top graphic designers in Julius Wiedeman’s Latin American Graphic Design.

Ed Ochester, who has served as general editor of the Pitt Poetry Series since 1979, is most recently the author of Unreconstructed: Poems Selected and New and editor of American Poetry Now: Pitt Poetry Series Anthology.