The Arsenic Lobster: A Hybrid Memoir
In The Arsenic Lobster, Peter Grandbois demonstrates a hard-won understanding of Lorca's avowal that  'The true fight is with the duende.' In this formally innovative and lyrically stunning memoir, Grandbois  transports us through a series of obsessions with disciplines of the utmost rigor--the sword, the guitar, the pen--until the self achieves immolation in the service of art. That trace of smoke we smell at the book's conclusion announces the baptism of a newly created thing. --Joshua McKinneyIn Peter Grandbois' 'hybrid' memoir the materials of his suburban anomie are cut apart and thrust into arresting and disturbing juxtapositions. Passages of spiky adrenalin play against a melancholic, duende-driven introspection as identity is assembled and re-assembled in a strobe-lit chamber. --Sven BirkertsIn this hilarious and poignant tour-de-force, our hero is caught in a maze of simulacra, the mirrored hallways of America gone mad. The hero s quest is to smash the mirrors around him--will his sword work? Could a guitar's chords shatter the glass with its rising duende? How can he demolish the specular artifice to find the scene of his real selves? But what is the real? And how do we get there, when there is no one to drive the car. --Eleni Sikelianos