Avatar
Evan Lavender-Smith is carving out his own unique place in American literature ... He brilliantly captures what it feels like to be utterly alone, isolated, set adrift, and the results are devastating. --BookslutA short masterpiece ... nothing less than captivating ... It just might be the snapshot of eternity we've all been hoping would never surface. --ViceThis narrative, like the light of the stars, travels as both particle and wave ... It exists so that we might begin to understand what it means to be a single point of light, in danger of eclipse. Let it and Lavender-Smith not go unnoticed. --American Book ReviewA marvel of a book ... Lavender-Smith'sAvatarunleashes language from its normal place, makes it something wilder. --The CollagistEvan Lavender-Smith has emerged as a writer about whom hype-abused words such asdaringmight legitimately apply. --Rain TaxiThe hypnotically cadenced monologue of Evan Lavender-Smith'sAvatarreaches us from such extremities of perversely perfected loneliness that, by elegant paradox, the self-haunting narrator deserves admission to the great, unconsolable fraternity of literature's everlasting isolatoes. --GARY LUTZ, author ofStories in the Worst WayandI Looked AliveThrough a process of carefully considered philosophical subtraction,Avatarrenders opaque everything you've come to think of as transparent and transparent everything you've thought of as opaque. Lavender-Smith's book is a moving and formally challenging meditation on perception and loneliness that never takes a false step. It feels less like cross-genre work than pre-genre work -- it cuts through all our protective etiquettes of writing and culture to get at something important, essential, and painfully human. --BRIAN EVENSON, author ofFugue StateandThe Open CurtainAvatarexposes the paradox of self-consciousness where, in order to know itself, the subject becomes its own object, but in doing so loses itself as subject, ending up suspended in a space between the knower and the known. Evan Lavender-Smith's language unreels the real of the mind's spiel, offering a Cartesian meditation on being numerous, and reinventing writing as fractal phenomenology. --ANDREW JORON, author ofThe Cry at ZeroandThe Sound MirrorAvataris a stunning work of linguistic pyrotechnics. Evan Lavender-Smith reveals how the fluidity of consciousness is mediated by sentences and grammar that even in their absence, mark boundaries. With apparent effortlessness,Avatarunderscores how language clarifies, unmasks, and conceals simultaneously. This is a book to be read and re-read, to be taught and celebrated. --SUSAN DAITCH, author ofL.C.andStorytownAvataris a study in black and white of the aloneness of the alone, the meditation of a Beckett-like speaker trying to remember his way through a nighttime space behind the hope of a star or stars, haunted by memories of a rooftop, a staircase, a fingernail and the company of hair. --DAVID ANTIN, author ofTalkingandi never knew what time it wasLike Beckett'sTexts for Nothingand Bernhard'sCorrection, of a light out of no light, Lavender-Smith'sAvatarat once makes me want to kill myself, and to live. --BLAKE BUTLER, author ofEverandScorch AtlasCrafted in pitch and endurance, and pushed perilously close to breaking point -- its thematic location and leitmotif -- these pages tell a cover story about the unwanted idea prompting a self to voice the reason of unreason. Brutalities of a century and ten years are contained in that ritual distress: totemic commonplace of the present. --ROBERTO TEJADA, author ofMirrors for GoldandExposition Park