ALL OVER - Roy Kesey

Publish Date: October 23, 2007
ISBN: 0-9793123-0-2
ISBN-13: 978-0-9793123-0-4
Price: $13.95

Also by Roy Kesey

Nothing in the World

Roy Kesey has been hailed as one of our best young writers, and All Over presents 19 of his most original and latest stories. George Saunders called Kesey’s writing, “beautiful and powerful... mythic, vivid, heart-rending." Roy's work has appeared in over 50 top flight literary journals, including Alaska Quarterly Review, Mississippi Review, and The Georgia Review. Several of the stories in All Over first appeared in journals such as Kenyon Review, McSweeney’s, Other Voices, and The Iowa Review. His story "Wait" will be included in Best American Short Stories 2007.

Kesey’s writing in All Over is filled with great inventiveness, his characters and stories at once unique and familiar. Roy believes that “ … there has to be something fundamentally human threaded through all that--fear and pain and love and worry and jealousy and generosity and spilled juice, say--for it to be worth writing or reading.” (Interview with Richard Cooper at Satori Kick).

Roy Kesey has previously published the novella, Nothing in the World (2006, Bullfight Press). Tom Bissell described it as "Beautiful, brave, and I will not soon forget it." Dzanc Books is delighted to be able to expose more of Roy’s writing to a much wider audience by publishing a collection of his short stories. As a young writer whose novella was unanimously well received, and with a lengthy story publishing resume, Roy is on the verge of exploding onto the scene. We here at Dzanc Books are thrilled to be able to announce the forthcoming publication of All Over.

"These stories by Roy Kesey, in the way they brilliantly blend humor and pathos, remind me of coins tossed in the air, turning over and over, one side cast in light, the other in darkness. His writing is original, fearless, strikingly funny, and clean - so clean - his words sharp enough to cut the eye."
—Benjamin Percy, author of The Language of Elk and Refresh, Refresh

"All Over is the strangest, best collection of stories you will read this year. With a seamless blend of lyricism and minimalism, Roy Kesey travels All Over the terrain of he psyche, the human condition, the relationships we have and fail to have. These stories team with insights, little horrors, moments of sweet verity, and surreal surprise. The characters are persuasive, and the storytelling is both hallucinatory and familiar. This is a new voice you must hear."
—Laura Kasischke, author of Be Mine, and five other titles

"Roy Kesey tempers his prodigious imagination with fine syntactic control, so that his stories – like Donald Barthelme’s – feel simultaneously free-wheeling and precise. All Over is an exhilarating collection – funny, harrowing, smart, odd, and inventive.”
—Chris Bachelder, author of U.S! and Bear vs. Shark

"Reading Roy Kesey is like being allowed to peep momentarily through a mysterious hole in the wall into a hidden universe that is very much like ours only slightly brighter, slightly sadder, certainly no less odd. Violinists play in the rain to keep swallows in flight. Strange, leaking packages tied up with string wait to be opened. In other words, Roy Kesey is a delight to read."
—Samantha Hunt, author of The Seas

"A restlessly inventive collection, as the best story collections so often are – comic and tender, ironic and earnest, deadpan and passionate. A distinctive new voice, from a distinctive new press."
—Peter Ho Davies, author of The Welsh Girl

"For those keen to know the next generation of the American short story, consider All Over, which features the loopy paranoia of Don DeLillo, the po-mo-mo whimsy of Donald Barthelme, the spooky learnedness of Thomas Pynchon, the high-minded literary sleight-of-hand of Robert Coover and John Barth, and the secret geek speak of George Saunders. Add a touch of the Brothers Grimm, Jules Verne, and the Looney Tunes, and you’ve got a book of a million moving parts, all of which work in breath-taking harmony to keep illusion aloft."
—Lee K. Abbott, author of All Things, All at Once: Collected Stories, and five other collections

"Roy Kesey’s excellent All Over is all over intelligent, intense, often very funny and frequently, frankly, beautiful. Stories in this collection will imminently appear in slightly different form in the deepest, darkest corners of your mind where they will burn, very, very brightly, for hours."
—Laird Hunt, author of The Paris Stories, The Impossibly, Indiana, Indiana, and The Exquisite

"In All Over, Roy Kesey’s postmodern parables are stunning mash-ups of style, content, characters. The book is a narrative train wreck that keeps happening of arcane jumbled juxtaposed graffitied rolling stock crashing into horribly hilarious verbal clown car kinetic sculpture."
—Michael Martone, author of The Flatness and Other Landscapes, and other titles

Roy Kesey is the author of Nothing in the World, winner of the 2005 Bullfight Review Little Book Prize. His work has appeared in McSweeney’s, The Kenyon Review and American Short Fiction, among other magazines, as well as in New Sudden Fiction 2006 and the Robert Olen Butler Prize Anthology. He currently lives in Beijing with his wife and children.