The Logic of the World and Other Fictions — Robert Kelly

Four previous volumes of Robert Kelly's manifestly original fictions have been hailed as “exhilarating...full of signs and wonders”; in the New York Times Book Review, “sparking, multiform, yet indivisible” in American Book Review, and “tantalizing, unsettling” in the Review of Contemporary Fiction. Choice rightly points to his “affinities with the writings of Borges, Nabokov, Calvino, and Coover.” The thirty works in this fifth collection of short fictions the first to appear in sixteen years knowingly trespass into fictional realms of droll lyricism, audacious description, studied anachronism, sensual immediacy and subtle compassion. In one, a woman waits at a window for the moon to return her body; another reveals the triple identity of Don Juan; in still another, an itinerant tragedian invents a dangerous form of theatrical performance; in the title story (which has been selected for inclusion in Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2010) a dragon questions a youthful knight's errancy, as well as his sanity. Scattered throughout are nine pieces known as “sudden fiction” a genre Kelly named, while other tales appear in the guises of myths, letters, rituals, and quite frequently dreams. “That is the single mystery of sleep,” one narrator reminds, “to teach us to wake up.” The author's agile imagination mines from the thick substance of language the numinous qualities buried within it. His fictions defy the conventionally plotted short story, and seem to conjure narrative from an infinitely recombinant DNA of the psyche. After reading The Logic of the World, the reader risks awakening to discover a hitherto unexplored territory of the mind.