BOB, or MAN on BOAT - Peter Markus

Price: $13.95

"Peter Markus is obsessed with a few words: brother, river, mud, lighthouse, fish, moon and star. From this sacred vocabulary springs a body of work—three books of stories and now a novel—that is sometimes confounding, often beautiful, starkly spare and totally unique. Bob, or Man on Boat is an authentically avant-garde work, refreshingly absent of any trace of pretension or irony. It is pure incantation and fable: prayer by any other name.

The story: A man named Bob sits on a boat, fishing. Another man, Bob’s son Bob, watches him and fishes, too. That’s about all that happens.

Like Gertrude Stein, Markus uses an elementary lexicon and recursive prose to make the mundane strange. 'Look at Bob’s hands. His knuckles are rivers. The skin on Bob’s hands, fish scale covered, they look like they’ve been dipped in stars.'

Markus’ work is not for everyone, and Bob is a book to truly love or hate. Count me among the lovers.
—Paste Magazine



"'What does a man whisper when he whispers to fish?' Detroit-based writer Peter Markus asks this question in his first novel, Bob, or Man on Boat. He answers the question with a collage of secret dialogues and minimalist dreams.

In short sentences built of small words, Markus has created a book that's as fluid as a river, yet solid as a stone. A man, Bob, finds a mystical connection with nature and his own fate through telling stories about his fisherman-father, who's also called Bob. The narrator thinks obsessively about the fisherman. He even thinks about the fisherman while he's thinking about other things. In the same way that the fish are the atomic structure of everything in the universe to the fisherman, so the fisherman is the entire universe to the narrator.

The narrator is a son, a husband, and a father himself. He buys a boat that belonged to a drowned man because he dreams of being like his father — the aloof, unreachable fisherman who has become so intertwined with the river that he's more like a pagan god than a person. In a plot that doesn't really move, but rocks on the water of Markus' deep and murky imagination, a small cast of characters lives and dies through a series of transactions with the river. The river takes people and gives them back to the land. Sometimes they're alive and sometimes they're dead. The river is a life-giving burial ground, a paradoxical place of lucidity and mud. The fisherman, Bob, is the minister of the river. Instead of movement, Markus's book offers transformations. A man is a fish, the fish are stars, and a man is mud. Where one might expect the chattering biographical gossip found in most fiction, he gives a story that constantly peers into an abyss. It squints, gazes, and every now and then, stops to rub its eyes. Newly released on the Michigan-based independent Dzanc Books, Bob, or Man on Boat follows Markus' collections of short fiction: Good, Brother; The Moon is a Lighthouse; and The Singing Fish. The new novel uses the same sparse, poetic, almost primitive style that distinguishes much of Markus' earlier work. But, for the first time, it demonstrates his ability to prolong the dream, and to sustain the mythic song till the last note is sung."
—The Detroit Metro Times

Peter Markus is the author of three short books of short-short fiction, Good, Brother (AWOL Press/reissued by Calamari Press), The Moon is a Lighthouse (New Michigan Press), and The Singing Fish (Calamari Press). His work has been published in a number of anthologies, including New Sudden Fiction (Norton), Fiction Gallery (Bloomsbury), Sudden Stories (Mammoth Books), and PP/FF: An Anthology (Starcherone Books). His stories have appeared widely in such journals as Black Warrior Review, Chicago Review, Massachusetts Review, Northwest Review, New Orleans Review, Quarterly West, 3rd Bed, Denver Quarterly, Third Coast, Willow Springs, Seattle Review, Post Road, New York Tyrant, Sleeping Fish, Verse, Another Chicago Magazine, Unsaid, and Dislocate, among many others. He lives in Trenton, Michigan, with his wife and two kids and is the Senior Writer with the InsideOut Literary Arts Project of Detroit.