CORRECTION

by Gabriel Blackwell

Gabriel Blackwell’s CORRECTION is a book of recognition and reckoning, fiction in its newest form. These 101 short story-essays (what are they?) plunge out of the dizzying, devastating, truthy world of social media and into the depths of our daily lives. The result is relentlessly precise, ferociously ethical, damning, sly and essential. Blackwell is at the height of his powers as one of the most innovative prose writers working today. To this hyper-mediated world, its texts swollen with absent facts and bad intent, we offer CORRECTION.

Praise for CORRECTION:

Blackwell has created an unsettling new kind of realism in this collection of flash-point shorts. At almost every page I found myself saying, “Well, this can’t be real,” while at the same time struggling to reconcile myself with the sheer familiarity of all these humans at their absurd and befuddled worst. I, too, had clicked on some of the headlines that informed these stories, but that was not what made this book so disconcertingly familiar. Rather, what I saw in CORRECTION was what I least wanted to see there: my own self looking back out at me.
SARAH BLACKMAN

WTF is this book exactly? It’s a compliment to the book that I can’t tell if these stories are found or made and in what proportion. Reading them gave me an unsettled and jittery feeling, like I was seeing too much of our world too rapidly, and just as I get a satisfying glimpse of a life or a state of being, it turns into something else and leaves me dazzled. CORRECTION feels true and it feels like now. ANDER MONSON

Cut Zola (who took the sociopolitical temperature of the times and was shrewd about people, aware of their size) with Gari Lutz who makes a sentence crackle to matter. Add work that splashes around in the apocalypse of our mutilated attention and increase with a pure injection of something like a Yahoo! News stream where the personal, the celebrity, the horror, smacks its lips at politics. Blackwell offers this, a series of taut windows that are mirrors that are all screens. We need new ideas about how to write stories given the window / mirror / screen / apocalypse thing and ever-new ways to hallow, hold, mutate and use attention. CAREN BEILIN

236 pages, Paperback

Published April 20, 2021

Reviews

[Bill Hsu · Rating 3 out of 5]

Compressed echos and/or distortions of our current crazy reality, steeped in a fractious political climate, overloaded with news and social media. There's certainly a lot I admire here, but it's tough for me to read more than a few of the 2-4 page pieces at a time. (If our last elections had gone differently, it would probably be impossible for me to read this at all.)

A lot of these pieces are very funny, in a WTF??? ludicrous way (like, in fact, more than a few news stories). For example, this is the entirety of no. 075:

I ought to have seen, long ago, that all along I'd been conspiring with outside forces to ruin any chances I'd had for happiness.

The last few pieces are more quiet and reflective. I do appreciate the opening of the last piece, No. 101 Selected Letters (In Which I Give Up):

Because, before the... accident, I used to teach writing, and because, even before that, I studied writing, I know there is this very popular idea that economy in writing is important above all. According to this view, if, in trying to communicate some idea or feeling, one writes a paragraph when one could have written a sentence communicating the same idea or feeling, the paragraph will be seen as wasteful and superfluous.

Considering how tired my friends are of my usual reaction ("Could be shorter"), I highly doubt the popularity of this idea, heh heh.

(3.5 stars)

[Benjamin Niespodziany · Rating 5 out of 5]

When poetics dance with journalism, when sparseness locks arms with a burning world. This book feels like reading the paper with a paintbrush. Watching the news with a napkin of blood. At times humorous, at times terrifying. Full of rants, digressions, and commas. Right up my alley.

[Angela Woodward · Rating 5 out of 5]

Blackwell's 101 "readymades"--brief essays, from a couple pages to a couple sentences--seem to roam over every topic a writer shouldn't be writing about. He takes on the endless distractions that keep us from noticing who we really are. A woman posts about her dream of a lizard; widespread reports of smart speakers recording their owners' conversations spark worry; a meme of a Weather Channel interview; attention-seeking behavior of the wrong demographic; air quotes around "beehive;" deep into the comments on a post it's incorrect to "like;" a sinkhole; nationalism. The various narrators try to make sense of the inane, or inanely expound on everyday disasters. Before one little hammer blow has sunk in, the reader finds herself turning the page, to be confronted by yet another vaguely familiar fake kidnapping or media commentator's malapropism. I kept promising myself to take a breather after the next chapter, but kept pressing the bar and ingesting the next banana-flavored pellet. Hilarious and compelling, Correction is a thoughtful meditation on media culture and the frittering away of all we have left of our attention.