The 44 unconventional stories in this short fiction collection from Klee (Ivyland) are virtually uncategorizable, but all are united by their wit and irony.
To read the rest of the review, visit Publishers Weekly.
The 44 unconventional stories in this short fiction collection from Klee (Ivyland) are virtually uncategorizable, but all are united by their wit and irony.
To read the rest of the review, visit Publishers Weekly.
The last known speakers of American English were garbagemen.
To view the full list, visit the blog of David Abrams,The Quivering Pen.
Miles Klee is a male Lydia Davis on a cyberpunk acid trip. These are stories, but the density, compression, precision, imagery, and rhythm of his language often feel like something else.
To read the rest of the review, visit Entropy.
Full Stop: From your popular blog Hate The Future (may it rest in peace) to the novel Ivyland to several stories in True False you have a distinct taste for dystopia—perhaps dystopia’s a bad word, but it sounds better than “sad stories about a future that’s kind of terrible.” Does this come from a place of fear? Entertainment? Shock and awe?
Miles Klee: Maybe dread? The future’s where we’re all gonna end up someday, man.
I also enjoy thinking about the things that will happen when I’m already dead.
To read the rest of the interview, visit Full-Stop.
The sketches in True False evoke, in their noir surrealism, something of the icy oddness associated with the work of the film director David Lynch. This is not an effect that is easily achieved, and the author is to be commended for pulling it off.
Read the full review in the Times Literary Supplement.
Halimah Marcus: In his introduction to the story, Matt Bell remarks on the range of styles in your writing. “Unlike most writers,” he writes, “who are so grateful to find something that succeeds that they end up mining that same patch of ground for most of their careers, Klee seems capable of writing any kind of story he wants, often starting by mimicking different genres and forms, then subverting those existing tropes to serve his own needs.” Is this range something you’ve intentionally cultivated? When write a story, to you set out to write something unlike anything you’ve written before?
Miles Klee: I’m lucky to have ideas at all. If one looks much different from another it’s surely because I’ve gone to the trouble of dressing them up in exotic new disguises—and the trappings of genre do go a long way there. When that stuff is working well, you get to be a virtuosic chameleon; the rest of the time, you’re blind in the wilderness. It’s a tricky sleight of hand, as Matt notes, that sets up an array of expectations to knock down. I’m not sure how conscious I am of this as it’s happening. Often I’ve just hit upon an inhabitable voice (e.g., the classic hardboiled narrator) that strikes me as lively and worth pursuit. I’ll let it spool out until a sharp left turn derails it—then I try to keep going. I guess that while I’m slavishly devoted to the styles and mannerisms of authors I admire, I remain a bit obsessional about narrative originality. A plotty resemblance to fiction another person has published can be unforgivable. A single repeated word can kill a whole page for me. It speaks to the fact that I’m trying to entertain and surprise myself as much as I seek to impress any theoretical reader.
To read the rest of the review, visit Electric Literature.
From Matt Bell’s introduction:
Unlike most writers, who are so grateful to find something that succeeds that they end up mining that same patch of ground for most of their careers, Klee seems capable of writing any kind of story he wants, often starting by mimicking different genres and forms, then subverting those existing tropes to serve his own needs.
To read the story, visit Electric Literature.
The influence and style is truly one of contemporary means, a collage so dense that it becomes wholly original itself. Pieces of Barthelme and Lipsyte and Lutz and Hempel and so many more are everywhere, with Klee’s imagination gluing it together in the biggest of ways.
To read the rest of the review, visit Heavy Feather Review.
The pool was bleeding. Byron noticed, adrift in shade on my shark floater: an acorn hit him on the head and he’d opened his eyes to find it bobbing in the water, ribbons of red uncoiling beneath. Came and got me and I got mom and she got dad.
“It’s not blood,” mom said, squinting. “What is it.”
“Not blood,” dad agreed.
No swimming till our pool guy Darren gave the OK. Byron and Mackenzie fought on the rock waterfall while he worked, Kenz fussing her bikini for tanline checks, Byron plugging the spout with his foot for fields of spray, gagging when he glimpsed the Runt’s flatness. That plus Darren’s screaming equipment plus Berkie pawing the door to go out were fucking up this Mozart piece, and just as I banged the piano shut, Kenzie materialized, dripping on hardwood. She did her who-wouldn’t-love-this smile, ran a tongue over top teeth. The braces were finally gone, but not the nightmares: threaded metal tightening, the crank when gum and bone pulled apart.
To read the rest of the story, visit The Lit Hub.