Deep Ellum — Brandon Hobson

Listed on Reader's Digest Best Short Books Under 150 Pages Listed as one of Flavorwire's 10 Must Read Books for March, 2014 Listed as one of Entropy's 10 Best Novels of the First Half of 2014 A miniature masterpiece of mood. -- San Diego City Beat Hobson is adept at matching mood with setting. -- The Dallas Morning NewsHobson establishes a city that is as lively as Twin Peaks... --Electric Literature ...ultimately a story of appreciation and hope. -- Southern Literary Review DEEP ELLUM is a novel of beauty and power, about family and transcending family, lives unwinding even as they tangle together. Brandon Hobson writes luminescent prose of hard-edged, quiet intensity. His narrator owns a voice at once mysterious and intimate, like a long-lost, slightly suspect friend returning to tell you how the world really is. In a mere 120 pages, Hobson fashions a universe so vivid you can read it in one sitting and stagger back to the world entranced. -Jerry Stahl Both dreamy and gritty, bleak and oblique, DEEP ELLUM treads the sketchy margins of Dallas, following one young man as he tries to reconnect with his family and reconcile his mystifying past with his uncertain present. Brandon Hobson's mordant portrait of the lost and damaged among us recalls the estranged, drifting world of Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son.-Stewart O'Nan Among all the bloated bookstore shelves with bloated books by bloated major presses there's Calamari Press and Brandon Hobson's DEEP ELLUM-sleek and powerful like some bright firework rising from the bloat. I feel lucky to have discovered this book.-Shane Jones If Dickens had written Through the Looking Glass or Alice in Wonderland, the result might have been Brandon Hobson's magically irreal and raw take, taking us deep into DEEP ELLUM. This fever-dreamed novel is adept at offering a gripping journey, scored without traction, not slippery but mired up to its one-thousand-yard staring eyeballs in that delicious sensation of general dread, that exhausted exhausted static velocity, all that going, going nowhere very very fast.-Michael Martone