Winner of the eighth Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction, as
selected by final judge Zachary Mason.
The stories in this collection have the texture of the long bad nights
that one keeps to oneself and is prone to think no one else experienced.
The gifted children contemplating murder, the husband drowning in
melancholy, the pro basketball athlete finding his road to Damascus all
emerge from adept torrents of words that bear comparison with Virginia
Woolf and David Foster Wallace.--Zachary Mason, author of The Lost
Books of the Odyssey
What we see in The Consummation of Dirk is a mind at work, a mind on
overdrive, a mind that is relentlessly chasing down thoughts that tumble
and slide and build and then circle back home only to be sent out into
the world again, broken and beautiful. Jonathan Callahan's stories are
twisted and hilarious and brilliant and announce the arrival of an
extraordinarily gifted writer.--Robert Lopez, author of Asunder
Stanley Elkin once said that all jokes are really about powerlessness.
If that's true, Jonathan Callahan's various odes to failure,
incompetence, and want are among the funniest jokes possible. Narrated
from the deep interior of misery, the stories in The Consummation of
Dirk are desperately, pyrotechnically, apocalyptically hilarious. But
they are also, in their strange way, tender. This is work that sings
across the divide of consciousness to touch us in our cages.--David
Hollander, author of L.I.E.
Jonathan Callahan's stories have appeared or are forthcoming in The
Collagist, Kill Author, The Lifted Brow, Pank, Underwater New
York, Unsaid, and Washington Square Review. He is originally from
Hawaii, studied fiction writing at Sarah Lawrence, and has taught at
SUNY/Purchase and in Japan.
