Unbuilt Projects

by Paul Lisicky

The many subjects of the individual short fiction pieces within Unbuilt Projects intersect God, sex, family, childhood, and adulthood. Fluctuating between descriptions of the exterior world and the speaker’s interior world, these stories are at once lyric and narrative, funny and heartbreaking, beautifully rich and stark. Here the subjective collides with the objective. These short, compelling stories show Lisicky at the top of his form.

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories, Poetry

116 pages, Paperback

First published October 9, 2012

About the author

PAUL LISICKY is the author of The Narrow Door, Unbuilt Projects, The Burning House, Famous Builder, and Lawnboy. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, BuzzFeed, Conjunctions, Fence, The Iowa Review, The Offing, Ploughshares, Tin House, and many other anthologies and magazines. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he’s the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the James Michener/Copernicus Society, the Henfield Foundation, the Corporation of Yaddo, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where he was twice a fellow. He has taught in the writing programs at Cornell University, New York University, Rutgers University-Newark, and Sarah Lawrence College. He teaches in the MFA Program at Rutgers University-Camden. .

Reviews

[Ethan · Rating 5 out of 5]

The line between auto-fiction and creative nonfiction has never been so thin as it is here

[Nick Mehalick · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is stunning. The Queen of It, The Roofers, Piss of New York, (I could go on) disentangle so much of memory and living with such succinctness I'm left consistently amazed.

[Lewis · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this slim collection, Lisicky stuns the reader with the quality of his language and insights that resonate deeply. Essentially prose poems, these pieces are never more than a few pages long, but all delivered with the sharpness and clarity of an astute observer. Some feel like fiction, but the majority have the lived-in quality of memoir—snapshots of moments on a journey, moments where something becomes undeniably clear, moments that become markers in a life.

Ranging from early childhood memories to explorations of adult sexuality, the pieces don’t tell a story so much as examine the moments that give it meaning. “In the Unlikely Event” describes a horrifying scene on a plane, where, fearful of crashing, the narrator finds himself disembodied—soaring out the window, floating so peacefully that he resents the safe landing and return to life. Many of the pieces deal with the death of the narrator’s mother when he was, one assumes, college age. Lisicky beautifully finds connection and meaning in a range of experiences—from his mother taking him to see a movie love story in order to deepen the connections he feels between emotion and art, to the simple act of making a sandwich, offering it to him along with permission to be who he is and surrender whatever expectations he imagines she has for him.

After a while, I came to see the resonance of the title. Each of these pieces might have been the genesis of a longer one—a story, a memoir, a novel. Instead, they remain captured moments in time, inspirations for projects that were never built. And there’s something truly wonderful in that: instead of building scaffolding around an idea, Lisicky gives us the thing itself, in all its purity, its raw emotion. The result is as profoundly moving as a longer, more complex work—in some instances, more so for offering an unobstructed view into the heart.

[Patricia Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm going to come across as biased here, since I published 2 of these shorts in my magazine Superstition Review: "The Queen of It," and "Lighten Up, It's Summer!" (With one of my favorite lines ever: "The blue of the pool should shut up.")

But I'm really taken with how Lisicky examines the Proustian moment of the child entering consciousness. I love the third sentence of "Palo Alto": "It might have been the thinking inside the houses I passed, minds at work over desks, fingers tapping keys, tapping foreheads."

I love this theme throughout the book--the coming to terms with unseen things that are close yet inaccessible. One of my favorite pieces that plays with that proximity is "The End of England," where the speaker straddles a perceptional space equation--paying attention half to his book and half to a woman creating a disturbance on a plane.

[D.A. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stories, like bodies, lean into each other, entwine and complicate each juncture of the new century in Paul Lisicky's Unbuilt Projects. With brief, electric sentences (for isn't that how we communicate in the 21st century?) of consummate beauty, Lisicky starts out from the joy in childhood and relates the sad and wondrous details of intimacies both familial and romantic that occur "sometime between that time and where we are now." If there's a place for poetry and prose to co-habitate, it's here in Lisicky's world: under the snowy rooftops and inside the empty rooms of apartments built, unbuilt, and destroyed. "The songs are blue and glistening." And they build.

[Ryan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Somewhat disturbing, however, I felt like I had to read it until the end so I fouls find some sense of resolution.

[Renée · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here is a link to my review at THE RUMPUS:

http://therumpus.net/2012/11/unbuilt-...

[Kristi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Heartbreaking, yes, but beautiful. The words don't demand to be felt so much as instinctually resonate within.