"After reading Jason Schwartz, it's difficult to talk about any other writer's originality or unique relation to the language. John the Posthumous is a work of astounding power and distinction, beautifully strange, masterful." -Sam Lipsyte
"[Schwartz] is complete, as genius agonizingly is." -Gordon Lish
"Haunting, original prose by a writer unlike any other on the planet. Jason Schwartz is a master." -Ben Marcus
John the Posthumous exists in between fiction and poetry, elegy and history: a kind of novella in objects, it is an anatomy of marriage and adultery, an interlocking set of fictional histories, and the staccato telling of a murder, perhaps two murders. This is a literary album of a pre-Internet world, focused on physical elements - all of which are tools for either violence or sustenance. Knives, old iron gates, antique houses in flames; Biblical citations, blood and a history of the American bed: the unsettling, half-perceived images, and their precise but alien manipulation by a master of the language will stay with readers. Its themes are familiar - violence, betrayal, failure - its depiction of these utterly original and hauntingly beautiful.
Jason Schwartz is also the author of A German Picturesque (Knopf, 1998).
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Memory of the World Librarian: Quintus

2025-02-18