Tell Borges If You See Him: Tales Of Contemporary Somnambulism (Flannery O'Connor Award For Short Fiction Ser.),New

ReviewPeter LaSalle has worked his way deep into the storytelling place. Serious, anomalous, his narratives are set into motion by the obsessions and perturbations of living. There is no model, no recipeeach world is uniquely known and irresistibly defined. Tell Borges If You See Him is a keeper collection. Sven Birkerts author of Reading Life: Books for the AgesPeter LaSalle may not be a literary household name, but if you read his latest collection of short stories, Tell Borges If You See Him, you might just wonder why not . . . LaSalle is a major talent . . . his stories are thought provoking and extremely satisfying. Providence Sunday JournalIncandescent short stories. Yankee Magazine on Hockey Sur Glace (A New York Times Book Review 'New & Noteworthy Paperback')LaSalle's stories are full of detail, and he knows how to create a sense of place, be it Buenos Aires, Austin, Texas, Paris, or Boston. He also possesses a gift for description. Atlanta JournalConstitutionPeter LaSalle writes about time that collides or implodes. Such collisions are never simply artful; rather, operating from inside his characters while still maintaining a sharpeyed distance (even with firstperson narratives), he dramatizes their complex dislocationstemporal, spatial, and emotional. LaSalle's characters move about in a state that straddles waking and sleeping, but the emotions they experience are real and run deep. . . . This writer owes a huge debt to Borges, certainly, but there's nothing tired or derivative about the imaginative world he has crafted. Regardless of his stories' settingsfrom Boston to Paristhere's an allAmerican brashness and brio. Georgia ReviewLaSalles command of the language is admirable, but even more admirable is his moral vision. Dallas TimesHerald on Strange SunlightThese are richly textured stories which invent their own forms. Missouri Review on The Graves of Famous WritersProduct DescriptionTo be untethered in the waking world, to have the feeling that perhaps we are sleepwalkingthats what life can be like for the people in these eleven stories by Peter LaSalle, known to readers of leading literary magazines for his luminous prose style and narrative daring.The characters range from a fragile, and very rich, Mount Holyoke College girl in Paris to an outofwork American businessman caught up in an international financial scam in Buenos Aires; from a happygolucky old pianolounge performer, once famous in all the New England seaside resorts, to a quartet of passengers on a bus barreling across the Mexican desert on Christmas Eveand heading right toward a nightmarish encounter indeed on the road. In one story, a troubled guy who is somehow both himself on a hockey scholarship at Harvard in the sixties and himself a few decades later, meets his beautiful lost girlfriend at a longgone Cambridge cafeteria. The busboys become hovering angels. Time slips backward and forward. Things that happened may not have happened.While rich with specific detail of character and place, these stories also tap into the stranger kind of clarity that does come, paradoxically, from subtle disorientation, as found in innovators like Nabokov and Borges. LaSalles lovely, rhythmic sentences, in which an aside can sometimes be the central concern, create a captivating permeability in the boundary between real and unreal while always enchanting with their power simply to tell a moving story. This is very original short fiction that aspires to nothing less than reasserting the wonderful possibilities of the genreor, as the narrator of the story The End of Narrative ultimately suggests: Maybe narrative hadnt ended, which is to say, hasnt ended.About the AuthorPETER LASALLE, 2006 Flannery OConnor Award for Short Fiction winner for Tell Borges If You See Him, is the author of eight previous books, including both novels and short story collectionsmost recently Sleeping Mask: Fictio