Praise for Daniel Grandbois’ Writing

On each page of Unlucky Lucky Days, a new alternative landscape opens out, as Grandbois sympathetically animates the emotional worlds of sea squirts, frogs, centipedes, hermit crabs, and even some of the weirder varieties of human beings. These are funny, bizarre, moving stories—a pleasure to read.

--Lydia Davis (Whiting Writer's Award, the French-American Foundation Translation Award, Guggenheim Fellowship, Lannan Literary Award, PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award finalist, French Insigna of the Order of Arts and Letters.)

Part fable, part creation myth… these stories conclude with riddles rather than platitudes... Many of these pieces are aware of how mischievous they are, of what fun they are having. The moral, or just as likely, the punch line, is out of reach. The result is stories that never condescend and always delight, as if making sense is overrated, a bad adult habit.

--Erica Wright(ForeWord Magazine)

Unlucky Lucky Days is a report from another world… [W]e are reminded of why we read fiction in the first place: to gain access to the wonderful peculiarities of the author’s mind. Brilliant.

--Jeff VanderMeer (‘This is fiction to stand alongside that of Calvino and Borges… could well be creating one of the dominant literary forms of the 21 century’ -The Guardian;his novels have made the year’s best lists of Publisher’s Weekly, Austin Chronicle, Amazon.com, and San Francisco Chronicle; translated into twenty languages)

Grandbois is a master of the double-edged word, of stories that both cut through the world like butter and double-back to saw themselves to bits. 

--Brian Evenson (Director of the Literary Arts Program at Brown University; IHG Award; O. Henry Prize; NEA Fellowship; translated Christian Gailly, Jean Frèmon, Jacques Jouet, and Claro from the French)

Animated by a wonderfully droll and fantastical imagination, these little stories are delicious.

--Rikki Ducornet (L.A. Times Book of the Year, National Book Critics' Circle Award finalist, Lannan Literary Award)

Daniel Grandbois has magicked up for us in this powerfully inventive… gloriously odd and wonderful [book].

--Laird Hunt (Believer Book Award; Shortlisted for the Firecracker Alternative Book Award; published in France by Actes Sud and greeted favorably in Le Monde and Le Magazine Litéraire)

Daniel Grandbois’s trembling leaflets bring to life all the rejecta and detritus scattered in such silent and secretive array around us, recovering all we thought lost or dead.

--Eleni Sikelianos (National Poetry Series Award; NEA and Fulbright Fellowships; Two Gertrude Stein Awards for Innovative American Writing)

Singularly original and captivating… an important work of fiction that should transform what notions of fiction may currently exist.

--Luis J. Rodriguez (Carl Sandburg Book Award; Lannan Fellowship for Poetry)

[A] modern space-time set of interconnected myths and stories… startling sets of shape shiftings and melting tableaus… elegantly precise… graceful… a work of art.

--Ed Sanders (American Book Award)

[A] collage of satire and slapstick, allegory and hallucination… an “art novel” in the fullest sense.

--Marguerite Feitlowitz (NY Times Notable Book Finalist; PEN-L.L. Winship Prize)

Original, disconcerting, and often hilarious… taut and insistent and grim and wicked and gnarled and cobwebbed… these stories have an immediacy and a tangibility that coexist in an odd and provoking way with their hazier, murkier qualities. We're all delighted to have the chance to showcase them.

--Micaela Morrissette (Senior Editor, Conjunctions)

Grandbois writes like a cool mystic, raised on a mad diet of glossalalia… [H]e offers us a divine look at existence, as if through the eyes of a child for whom Pythagoras might very well be a constellation of gum wads, once upon a time when nobody was born.

--Tim Z. Hernandez (American Book Award, Zora Neal Hurston Award)

This book will be read as much for its experimental language as for its ‘content,’… what’s admirable is its quality of experiment… a collage-form anti-organization [that] achieves coherence much the same way a cubist painting does.

--Douglas Unger (Pulitzer Prize Finalist)