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The Complete Collection of people, places & things
by
John Dermot Woods (Goodreads Author)
Fiction. "John Woods' THE COMPLETE COLLECTION brings the small-town America of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio into conversation with Italo Calvino's fake travelogue, Invisible Cities, and that book's dreamish vision of Imperial China. Like Calvino's novel, the book evokes a kind of nearly Renaissance-like iconographic worldview of Memory and the Imagination, but one c...more
Paperback, 178 pages
Published
July 1st 2009
by BlazeVOX
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Reading JDW's intricate little collection of stories about a small town and the covey of strange characters that haunt it, I was initially at a loss in trying to describe it. Here is this sleepy village, populated by tendancies and residents and laws worthy of a strange, pleasant dream. The inanimate shake with life. The episodes are farcical, but at the edge of every joke or wordplay is a hint of seriousness. Or perhaps it's the reverse. Punctuating each story is Wood's artwork, introducing cha...more
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A cycle of stories full of a whimsical inventiveness not unlike the French writer Eric Chevillard. Apparently Woods was mentored by Stephen Dixon whose blurb appears on the back cover though his writing style is very different. Hopefully there's a long and productive literary career ahead for this very talented new (to me at least) voice.
The Complete Collection... reads like a fairytale with a cast from the 1980s. For example, pop culture references abound, serving primarily as character names—Optimus Prime, Alf, Hacksaw Jim, Stormshadow, Punky Brewster, etc. The novel’s divided into sections, and each section utilizes an adept, black and white sketch as its preface. Fittingly, every section could stand alone, but, when combined, they do indeed form a coherent narrative....
Read the rest in the November 2009 issue of decomP .
Read the rest in the November 2009 issue of decomP .
What's really fun about this book is how it works as a collection of, well, people places, and things, in this little village. You move from character to character (many of them recurring), to particular events/settings (i.e., The Canals), and as you keep reading you get the sense that you're the collector, and you keep building a little world as each new person, place, and things winds its way into your possession. A fun fun read.
Both weird and absorbing. Said differently, if in some parallel universe Lars Von Trier and Henry Darger decided to write a flash fiction collection together it just might look a lot like this.
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John Dermot Woods lives with his family in Brooklyn, NY. His debut novel is The Complete Collection of people, places & things. His stories and comics have appeared in many journals, including The Indiana Review, Hobart, American Letters & Commentary, Salt Hill, and 3rd Bed. His comic chapbook, The Remains, is forthcoming from Doublecross Press. He edits the arts quarterly Action,Yes and o...more
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