Porgy & Bess

by Jeffrey DeShell

Porgy and Bess is both artfully daring and morally engaging, a wonderful instance of “passionate virtuosity.” Here, the detective novel’s obsession with the grounded rationality of evidence floats away through voices that hang gloomily together, a whole of irresolvable parts. Porgy and Bess is both the death of the detective novel and its beautiful rebirth. Masses and Motets Jeffrey DeShell has managed to make the form of the crime novel erudite, challenging, and entertaining at the same time. What a wonderful trompe l’oeil, a true literary experiment and adventure. This is a truly fine piece of work. Percival Everett The Trouble with Being Born In The Trouble with Being Born, the parents trade riffs, mother and father telling their stories in short, staccato sentences. Jeffrey DeShell’s writing of them gets under the skin, the way parents’ “autobiographies” also live under their children’s lives. DeShell is a daring, intelligent, hard-eyed, and tenderhearted writer, all of which is abundantly evident in his wonderful new novel. Lynne Tillman Arthouse An avant-noir tour de force, Jeffrey DeShell’s Arthouse is an architecturally stunning exploration of how we are all thought by cinema. Peopled by tweakers, dealers, killers, a woman hostage, and an ex-con academic, set in a blasted corner of the New West, and shot through the lenses of fourteen films, this extraordinary novel appropriates and celebrates a multiplicity of filmic vocabularies and points of view, even as it turns family into a Fellini, sex into a Suzuki, and the world into a series of eccentric angles, incommensurate scripts, and beautiful, stylized, joco-serious, self-reflexive textual double exposures. Lance Olsen

158 pages, Paperback

Published September 29, 2022

About the author

Jeffrey DeShell is the author of four novels: Peter: An (A)Historical Romance (Starcherone 2006), The Trouble with Being Born (FC2 2008), S & M and In Heaven Everything is Fine (FC2) and a critical book, The Peculiarity of Literature: An Allegorical Approach to Poe’s Fiction. He has co-edited two collections of fiction by American women, Chick-Lit I: Postfeminist Fiction and Chick-Lit II: No Chick Vics (FC2), and was a Fulbright Teaching Fellow in Budapest, Hungary, 1999-2000. He has taught in Northern Cyprus, the American Midwest and was on the faculty of the Milton Avery Graduate School for the Arts at Bard College. He is currently an associate professor and Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Colorado at Boulder.