{"product_id":"9780998187211","title":"The Conduit and Other Tales of Visionary Morphing Whimsy","description":"\u003cbr\u003eFiction. \"What Gessner does best, perhaps, is create microcosms—self-contained worlds in which he has made up the rules and established the action. I'm reminded of a drop of water, which, under van Leeuwenhoek's microscope, turned out to be teeming with alien creatures possessed of varied modes of swimming. I am reminded of Blake: Gessner dramatizes the Romantic poet's belief that there is a world in a grain of sand. \u003cem\u003eThe Conduit\u003c\/em\u003e, one of the more visionary pieces, demonstrates Gessner's ability to expand space and uncover its inhabitants in a seemingly infinite regression. It begins as the tale of a man who has been stabbed in the heart crawls into a sewer pipe to die, but the pipe is an existential anomaly—'Huge, wide, longer than all-seeing memory'—and harbors not only the wounded man, but also a good chunk of the universe.\u003cp\u003e\"The surreal aspects of Gessner's stories recall the work of French author Raymond Roussel (1877-1933). In Roussel's novel \u003cem\u003eLocus Solus\u003c\/em\u003e, for example, we encounter a scientist who has invented a balloon-powered, road- building machine, which, using human teeth of varying hues of brown, is assembling a mosaic of a Native American warrior. While this is the sort of oddity a reader shouldn't be surprised to turn up in a Gessner fiction, the language Roussel uses is Victorian in its formality and almost scrupulously objective—at least in translation—as might befit a scientist. Roussel's novel is carried not so much by his style as by an array of ingenious curiosities. Gessner strikes a more equal balance between the poetry of the prose and the parade of strangeness, between whimsical wordplay and the progression of the tale itself.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"He is also relentlessly funny. Virtually every paragraph in \u003cem\u003eExcerpts from the Diary of a Neanderthal Dilettante\u003c\/em\u003e—the title is self-explanatory—presents the reader with material worthy of a stand- up routine.\"—Vincent Czyz\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Rain Mountain Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47021384859888,"sku":"9780998187211","price":15.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9780998187211_p0.jpg?v=1763897591","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9780998187211","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}