Evenson's first collection of 25 short stories and one novella,
Altmann's Tongue (1994), garnered comparisons to Paul Bowles, Poe, and
Kafka and is considered by many an existential masterpiece.
Chilling and severe, these stories reveal humans struggling with the
brutality of the world and with one another, and trying to talk their
way out of their own helplessness and fear.
In Evenson's world, moral and social categories dissolve and mutate, and
our own understanding of our relationship to reality itself seems
increasingly vexed and contingent. A father buries his daughter without
telling his wife that she has died. A man commits two murders, one
justified, the other not, and then undergoes a startling transformation.
A detective wanders through a case, becoming further and further
estranged from even the possibility of truth.
"Showing off Evenson's myriad skills, the stories range from rural tales
of death to a retelling of the biblical Job story, in which a
skeletonized Job trades barbs and blows with a murderous lumberjack....
There is a detached brutality to the collection, similar to Beckett's
novels, which, due to Evenson's precise control over language, is both
disturbing and compelling." (Review of Contemporary Fiction)
