True False
Stories
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
"Miles Klee demonstrates a delightfully prehensile grasp of the more oblique peculiarities of sentience. Very highly recommended." —William Gibson
"Miles Klee is a fresh genius of the American literary sentence, and his every paragraph is aburst with nervous, agitative exactitudes. So much gets itself zanily and definitively rendered in the crackle of his ultravivid prose that True False is not just a joltingly original collection but the essential record of the inner terrors of our hyperurban era." —Gary Lutz
"Miles Klee is a male Lydia Davis on a cyberpunk acid trip." —Entropy
Klee’s last book, his first, was variously hailed as “sharply intelligent” (Publishers Weekly) and “harsh, spastic” (Justin Taylor): we like to think of True False as intelligently spastic, or sharply harsh—disquieting and funny. A collection of stories that range from the very short to the merely short, these forty-four tales evoke extraordinary scenes in an understated manner that’s marked Klee one of today’s most intriguing writers. From the apocalyptic to the utopic, from a haunted office building to a suburban pool that may be alive, a day in the mind of a demi-god Pythagoras to a secret race to develop artificial love, True False captures a fractured reality more real than our own.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The 44 unconventional stories in this short fiction collection from Klee (Ivyland) are virtually uncategorizable, but all are united by their wit and irony. Some are vaguely science fictional, such as "A Syndicate of Angels," set in a futuristic New York where electric light is rationed and the rich throw "moth parties." . Others follow their quirky premises down amusingly oddball avenues: for example, in "Love," rival companies compete to market inducements for love. Thought-provoking pieces, such as "Pythagoras Too," in which the Greek philosopher travels freely across time and space and is disappointed by the various realities he sees, alternate with catalogue stories, such as "An Unexpected Masterpiece," in which a fictional version of Klee lists the accolades garnered and controversies provoked by a novel that he never wrote. The book's most audacious story, "Ibid.," is a narrative of 16 paragraphs, each constructed from sentences sampled from the work of other writers and annotated with pithy footnotes appraising each original work and its author. Most of the book's longer stories are very loosely plotted and focused more on character responses to their situations, but the shorter stories sandwiched between them some only a sentence or paragraph long are distinguished by their wry observations and O. Henry-style twists. Much of the enjoyment these stories provide comes from seeing how much mileage the author can squeeze out of their unusual themes and ideas.
