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Patchwork
Tom Comitta returns with a novella that is at once a picaresque quest for a stolen snuffbox and a marvel of literary découpage, equal parts love story, old-fashioned thriller, and absurdist romp.
To whom does a story belong? Who is its author? What is an author? Does it matter? These questions and more populate the subversive and audacious Patchwork, a comical tragedy that highlights the connective tissue that joins stories to themselves as well as to the grand history of storytelling itself. Celebrating the tropes and clichés of classical novels while simultaneously forging them into an original narrative, Patchwork ultimately shows us that the stories produced by hundreds of writers past—celebrated or obscure, reverent or hilarious, factual or fantastical—may, in the hands of a master, become a single, seamless whole.
To whom does a story belong? Who is its author? What is an author? Does it matter? These questions and more populate the subversive and audacious Patchwork, a comical tragedy that highlights the connective tissue that joins stories to themselves as well as to the grand history of storytelling itself. Celebrating the tropes and clichés of classical novels while simultaneously forging them into an original narrative, Patchwork ultimately shows us that the stories produced by hundreds of writers past—celebrated or obscure, reverent or hilarious, factual or fantastical—may, in the hands of a master, become a single, seamless whole.
- GenresShort StoriesNovella
159 pages, Paperback
First published August 19, 2025
92 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
August 20, 2025
Coffee House Press continues to bring us work from the slightly unhinged fringe with this “novella” where Comitta has taken all of their lines from seemingly hundreds of works (that are now out of copyright) and made a quilt out of them (with an extensive bibliography at the end of the book). Their inspiration, they say, is not only their previous *The Nature Book* (where they took “nature descriptions from three hundred … novels”) but also a painting by David Hockney called Nichols Canyon:
“I realized I could apply this technique—a combination of disparate patterns that form a cohesive, unified work—to fiction.”
The result is yes, at first bewildering, and then surprisingly entertaining and really quite clever. It’s loosely a story about a man who’s in love with Catherine and it’s also the story of a lost snuffbox. As you can imagine from how it was made, lots of weird things happen (mass flight from who knows what, and there's a duel towards the end of the book—I love duels). Additionally, a whole section shows the narrators path home *in images* (XXIV: BEING A VISUAL RENDERING OF MY WALK HOME). A laugh-out-loud (it was for me) chapter is all ellipses, em dashes, underscores etc; readers of pre-20th c. lit will be very familiar with this bewildering convention. There’s that one with the very liberal use of the letter *b*. The one with lots about the sun not yet being risen is illuminating. And then that one chapter full of the author’s self-admittedly juvenile use of many instances of the word “ejaculate.”
It’s a richly visual book, and I rather wish I’d had my hands on a physical copy.
Anyway, I really liked this Frankenstein’s monster! I’m quite impressed with the number of hours Comitta must have put into both researching it and making it work. It’s pretty smart. And in this world where human creativity is increasingly devalued by tech bros, this is a wonderful reminder of what we can do.
Thanks to Coffee House Press and Edelweiss for an early DRC.
“I realized I could apply this technique—a combination of disparate patterns that form a cohesive, unified work—to fiction.”
The result is yes, at first bewildering, and then surprisingly entertaining and really quite clever. It’s loosely a story about a man who’s in love with Catherine and it’s also the story of a lost snuffbox. As you can imagine from how it was made, lots of weird things happen (mass flight from who knows what, and there's a duel towards the end of the book—I love duels). Additionally, a whole section shows the narrators path home *in images* (XXIV: BEING A VISUAL RENDERING OF MY WALK HOME). A laugh-out-loud (it was for me) chapter is all ellipses, em dashes, underscores etc; readers of pre-20th c. lit will be very familiar with this bewildering convention. There’s that one with the very liberal use of the letter *b*. The one with lots about the sun not yet being risen is illuminating. And then that one chapter full of the author’s self-admittedly juvenile use of many instances of the word “ejaculate.”
It’s a richly visual book, and I rather wish I’d had my hands on a physical copy.
Anyway, I really liked this Frankenstein’s monster! I’m quite impressed with the number of hours Comitta must have put into both researching it and making it work. It’s pretty smart. And in this world where human creativity is increasingly devalued by tech bros, this is a wonderful reminder of what we can do.
Thanks to Coffee House Press and Edelweiss for an early DRC.
August 17, 2025
Real Rating: 4.5* of five
The Publisher Says: Tom Comitta returns with a novella that is at once a picaresque quest for a stolen snuffbox and a marvel of literary découpage, equal parts love story, old-fashioned thriller, and absurdist romp.
To whom does a story belong? Who is its author? What is an author? Does it matter? These questions and more populate the subversive and audacious Patchwork, a comical tragedy that highlights the connective tissue that joins stories to themselves as well as to the grand history of storytelling itself. Celebrating the tropes and clichés of classical novels while simultaneously forging them into an original narrative, Patchwork ultimately shows us that the stories produced by hundreds of writers past—celebrated or obscure, reverent or hilarious, factual or fantastical—may, in the hands of a master, become a single, seamless whole.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: Every so often it's very helpful to one's mood to see Literature cavorting naked, ignoring your shocked gaze. It's a little like finding those nudes of your grandfather, young and virile, displaying for whoever it was that took them. (DON'T ASK.)
Tom Comitta's displaying Literature's bare backside as he remixes bits and pieces of what others wrote to serve new meanings and explore ideas of authorship, of Authority, by...ignoring it. Samuel Beckett made similar experiments sixty years ago. It's refreshing, to say the least, when someone looks afresh at shibboleths like Literature and sees what's under its underpants instead of reverently praising its court dresses.
The means by which he accomplishes this is to set Literature off on a snipe hunt for a snuff box. Ostensibly. Sorta-kinda, anyway, but we ain't goin' in a line, let alone a straight one, anywhere. There are lots and lots of side quests, points where you put your readerly trust in Author Comitta because if there's a path ahead you sure can't see it, and then lo! Behold the comic-strip of a walk home, made up entirely of Victorian artwork that decorated Dickens novels.
Does it make sense? Yes, but in a curious way, no. It's consistent with hunting, with being in motion; it's a metacommentary on research and its pleasures; it's not the only time we are required to double-clutch the non-synchromesh transmission of this assembled car of many manufacturer's bits to see if we're going to make it up the hill of narrative logic.
Don't count on it.
We're then thrust into an olfactory assessment of the walk that runs through Richard Price's evocative prose pertaining to a mall food court's assault on one's nose. That's really another sly rib-poke. A huge assortment of things made into one thing in our readerly framework just by the accident of proximity...like reading the thesaurus as a story, like using all the words you find there in chains of meaning.
It's short, barely two hundred pages. It's pungent and oddly elegant, see above. It's unusual, it's not country you necessarily have a map for at hand (unless you own a copy of Robbe-Grillet's Jealousy, that is). Patchwork is a perfect title for this patched-up piecework example of how to quilt, tat, and knit a whole thing, to sew bits into a refined Frankensteinian monster, that becomes a whole and separate artwork. It's a read that is animated in its parts by many heads and hands long-dead mostly forgotten and revived, reanimated, restored and repurposed by Tom Comitta.
He's done this before, The Nature Book came out from Coffee House Press in 2023 when his subject was the deathly serious issue of climate change; I didn't read it because, well, grim much? I'll go back and pick it up. The world needs fresh ways of thinking about things we already (think we) know. Perspectives like Comitta's are forceful reminders that knowledge, that what already exists in our heads, is not static, not fixed in one pattern, unless we force, allow, ignore it to be. I can't offer a perfect five because, in order to ask people for money, the publisher needs to tell them it's *about* something so a plot of sorts is crafted...I'd say grafted, in the sense skin is over a wound...and it really doesn't add a whole lot to the exercise.
Freshen up your readerly search engine by querying it in unusual ways. You're rewarded by surprises and pleasures not easy to find.
The Publisher Says: Tom Comitta returns with a novella that is at once a picaresque quest for a stolen snuffbox and a marvel of literary découpage, equal parts love story, old-fashioned thriller, and absurdist romp.
To whom does a story belong? Who is its author? What is an author? Does it matter? These questions and more populate the subversive and audacious Patchwork, a comical tragedy that highlights the connective tissue that joins stories to themselves as well as to the grand history of storytelling itself. Celebrating the tropes and clichés of classical novels while simultaneously forging them into an original narrative, Patchwork ultimately shows us that the stories produced by hundreds of writers past—celebrated or obscure, reverent or hilarious, factual or fantastical—may, in the hands of a master, become a single, seamless whole.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: Every so often it's very helpful to one's mood to see Literature cavorting naked, ignoring your shocked gaze. It's a little like finding those nudes of your grandfather, young and virile, displaying for whoever it was that took them. (DON'T ASK.)
Tom Comitta's displaying Literature's bare backside as he remixes bits and pieces of what others wrote to serve new meanings and explore ideas of authorship, of Authority, by...ignoring it. Samuel Beckett made similar experiments sixty years ago. It's refreshing, to say the least, when someone looks afresh at shibboleths like Literature and sees what's under its underpants instead of reverently praising its court dresses.
The means by which he accomplishes this is to set Literature off on a snipe hunt for a snuff box. Ostensibly. Sorta-kinda, anyway, but we ain't goin' in a line, let alone a straight one, anywhere. There are lots and lots of side quests, points where you put your readerly trust in Author Comitta because if there's a path ahead you sure can't see it, and then lo! Behold the comic-strip of a walk home, made up entirely of Victorian artwork that decorated Dickens novels.
Does it make sense? Yes, but in a curious way, no. It's consistent with hunting, with being in motion; it's a metacommentary on research and its pleasures; it's not the only time we are required to double-clutch the non-synchromesh transmission of this assembled car of many manufacturer's bits to see if we're going to make it up the hill of narrative logic.
Don't count on it.
We're then thrust into an olfactory assessment of the walk that runs through Richard Price's evocative prose pertaining to a mall food court's assault on one's nose. That's really another sly rib-poke. A huge assortment of things made into one thing in our readerly framework just by the accident of proximity...like reading the thesaurus as a story, like using all the words you find there in chains of meaning.
It's short, barely two hundred pages. It's pungent and oddly elegant, see above. It's unusual, it's not country you necessarily have a map for at hand (unless you own a copy of Robbe-Grillet's Jealousy, that is). Patchwork is a perfect title for this patched-up piecework example of how to quilt, tat, and knit a whole thing, to sew bits into a refined Frankensteinian monster, that becomes a whole and separate artwork. It's a read that is animated in its parts by many heads and hands long-dead mostly forgotten and revived, reanimated, restored and repurposed by Tom Comitta.
He's done this before, The Nature Book came out from Coffee House Press in 2023 when his subject was the deathly serious issue of climate change; I didn't read it because, well, grim much? I'll go back and pick it up. The world needs fresh ways of thinking about things we already (think we) know. Perspectives like Comitta's are forceful reminders that knowledge, that what already exists in our heads, is not static, not fixed in one pattern, unless we force, allow, ignore it to be. I can't offer a perfect five because, in order to ask people for money, the publisher needs to tell them it's *about* something so a plot of sorts is crafted...I'd say grafted, in the sense skin is over a wound...and it really doesn't add a whole lot to the exercise.
Freshen up your readerly search engine by querying it in unusual ways. You're rewarded by surprises and pleasures not easy to find.
November 16, 2025
The language is beautiful - even where the precise meaning seems obscure. "I was the shadow of the waxwing, slain by the false azure in the windowpane. I was 100 miles from Nowhere." (p. 3)
The book definitely fits the description of 'experimental', with illustrations, sequences of images as if from a flip book (but stretched along the bottom of the page, pages of doodles, insets, inserts, footnotes, a 5-page run-on sentence... There is some (low) humor, e.g. the "Climax of the Book" which simply uses the word 'ejaculated' instead of the common 'said'.
Yet the convoluted tale of the snuff box does not draw the reader through the pages, and the century-old writing conceit, mixed with modern parlance, is uneven and tiresome, as one might expect. 'Being the Style of Each Chapter Heading, A Description of the Contents' and '... there arose confusedly and paradoxically within my mind..." to "In the next room, the air was awfully stuffy."
At the same time, it seems a clever person must have conceived this, while also, as if a collection of notes and chapters written completely independently, perhaps as various experiments and exercises in style and content, were strung together, after someone noticed a thread or a theme that could be connected with a minimum of additional writing. (Yep, annoying and convoluted, as well.)
The marketing 'big deal' - every word taken from another book - did not impress. There is easily over 2 million books published EACH YEAR. Oh, and the author 'gathered fragments from hundreds of novels and arranged them into a story'. Seems like a fun personal challenge, but that wouldn't be too far off from using the dictionary, would it?
Say instead, for example, limiting oneself to only ad slogans, or perhaps the first sentence of the 5th chapter of any book, that might be a real challenge.
Ideally, using another writer's words should also bring echoes of the context, adding depth to the new story. For example, the phrase "Look, up in the sky!" is the iconic phrase for early Superman movies. When Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons use it, there's always something (else) unexpected in the sky, so the reference is humorous. And the sight gag is humorous, whether the viewer gets the original reference or not.
In this work, the 'fragments' remove most of the identifications, and there are so many its not really possible to recognize or hearken back to the source. So it plays out as a technical exercise, rather than a literary device.
IMO, the various styles are interesting, but appear to have no clear pattern to or reason for their inclusion (beyond 'just because' or 'it seemed a neat idea'.) As presented, it feels chaotic, which plays out as unfinished, still in need of editing. Gimmicks are not a sufficient replacement for quality story scripting.
To do justice to the introduction of the design concept, the story should have been less ridiculous, and the book should have been 60-80 pages instead of 180. Also, the copy should have benefited from the design style, rather than simply allowing it. For example, the 'thought process' diagram on p. 21 is interesting as art, but seems irrelevant to the story. "googoo', a quote from Hamlet, an outline of a jigsaw puzzle piece, 'me me me', 'puke', 'Voltaire', words in Hebrew and Arabic, (etc.) look cool as art, but are distracting and annoying in the story.
Good experiment, not a great execution as a story.
The book definitely fits the description of 'experimental', with illustrations, sequences of images as if from a flip book (but stretched along the bottom of the page, pages of doodles, insets, inserts, footnotes, a 5-page run-on sentence... There is some (low) humor, e.g. the "Climax of the Book" which simply uses the word 'ejaculated' instead of the common 'said'.
Yet the convoluted tale of the snuff box does not draw the reader through the pages, and the century-old writing conceit, mixed with modern parlance, is uneven and tiresome, as one might expect. 'Being the Style of Each Chapter Heading, A Description of the Contents' and '... there arose confusedly and paradoxically within my mind..." to "In the next room, the air was awfully stuffy."
At the same time, it seems a clever person must have conceived this, while also, as if a collection of notes and chapters written completely independently, perhaps as various experiments and exercises in style and content, were strung together, after someone noticed a thread or a theme that could be connected with a minimum of additional writing. (Yep, annoying and convoluted, as well.)
The marketing 'big deal' - every word taken from another book - did not impress. There is easily over 2 million books published EACH YEAR. Oh, and the author 'gathered fragments from hundreds of novels and arranged them into a story'. Seems like a fun personal challenge, but that wouldn't be too far off from using the dictionary, would it?
Say instead, for example, limiting oneself to only ad slogans, or perhaps the first sentence of the 5th chapter of any book, that might be a real challenge.
Ideally, using another writer's words should also bring echoes of the context, adding depth to the new story. For example, the phrase "Look, up in the sky!" is the iconic phrase for early Superman movies. When Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons use it, there's always something (else) unexpected in the sky, so the reference is humorous. And the sight gag is humorous, whether the viewer gets the original reference or not.
In this work, the 'fragments' remove most of the identifications, and there are so many its not really possible to recognize or hearken back to the source. So it plays out as a technical exercise, rather than a literary device.
IMO, the various styles are interesting, but appear to have no clear pattern to or reason for their inclusion (beyond 'just because' or 'it seemed a neat idea'.) As presented, it feels chaotic, which plays out as unfinished, still in need of editing. Gimmicks are not a sufficient replacement for quality story scripting.
To do justice to the introduction of the design concept, the story should have been less ridiculous, and the book should have been 60-80 pages instead of 180. Also, the copy should have benefited from the design style, rather than simply allowing it. For example, the 'thought process' diagram on p. 21 is interesting as art, but seems irrelevant to the story. "googoo', a quote from Hamlet, an outline of a jigsaw puzzle piece, 'me me me', 'puke', 'Voltaire', words in Hebrew and Arabic, (etc.) look cool as art, but are distracting and annoying in the story.
Good experiment, not a great execution as a story.
September 10, 2025
Such a curious concept--a novel in which every sentence is taken from another book. How is that possible, I asked before I read the author's end note describing his process of seeing trends in the manner novels are written that allowed him to weave together sentences and paragraphs that kinda sorta follow a narrative path, patched together with many sentences from two novels featuring a woman named Catherine and two involving a snuff box. Catherine and the snuff box are at the heart of this story's faint narrative arc. It is often amusing and it is fun to occasionally recognize where a sentence came from ("there were a number of roads but we found the one made of yellow brick").
Every source book is identified at the end of the book, but is a chore to correlate the exact sentence with the source reference. Still, such a great idea for the first chapter--every sentence being the opening sentence of another book. It isn't really a novel but I found it enjoyable.
Every source book is identified at the end of the book, but is a chore to correlate the exact sentence with the source reference. Still, such a great idea for the first chapter--every sentence being the opening sentence of another book. It isn't really a novel but I found it enjoyable.
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August 22, 2025I interviewed Tom! https://necessaryfiction.com/intervie...
I also reviewed Patchwork for my site:
It’s been the trademark of a handful of authors to graft an alien sentence or two among the branches of their own prose. Herman Melville, Guy Davenport, W. G. Sebald, they all did it to different degrees, but no one’s come close to matching the efforts or aims of Tom Comitta, whose latest novel, Patchwork, ventures far beyond this simple notion of grafting. No, Patchwork is exactly what it sounds like, a textual quilt composed entirely of other author’s sentences. …
Read the rest here: https://ocreviewofbooks.org/2025/08/2...
I also reviewed Patchwork for my site:
It’s been the trademark of a handful of authors to graft an alien sentence or two among the branches of their own prose. Herman Melville, Guy Davenport, W. G. Sebald, they all did it to different degrees, but no one’s come close to matching the efforts or aims of Tom Comitta, whose latest novel, Patchwork, ventures far beyond this simple notion of grafting. No, Patchwork is exactly what it sounds like, a textual quilt composed entirely of other author’s sentences. …
Read the rest here: https://ocreviewofbooks.org/2025/08/2...
October 2, 2025
I felt many different things reading this book. It is primarily an impressive balance of deconstruction/critique of the typical novel tropes and themes, and construction of a new narrative built out of so many small parts from a long list of other novels. It’s impressive, funny at times, confusing at others, extraordinarily creative, forced me to think about the novel and how it is constructed, and above all else kept me on my toes.
Really enjoyed it and applaud the obvious labor of love this book is, and will benefit from re-reads to enjoy the journey again.
Really enjoyed it and applaud the obvious labor of love this book is, and will benefit from re-reads to enjoy the journey again.
December 3, 2025
Plus one star for effort. Not for me.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews