Library Journal says it all:

[Mark] Sarvas, writer of the highly praised literary blog, The Elegant Variation, has written a brilliantly funny and heart-wrenching first novel about one man’s struggle to face the truth. … Harry Rent is of the same ilk as Walter Mitty and Rabbit Angstrom: deeply flawed, likable, and hilariously, touchingly memorable.

The paperback edition of Harry, Revised is now available. Here are Mark’s answers to the set of questions we call the Fictionaut Five.

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The Los Angeles Times compared Marc Fitten‘s “penchant for sweeping allegory” to Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe before mentioning Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, and M. Glenn Taylor. Fitten’s debut novel Valeria’s Last Stand, set in an imaginary Hungarian village, is, the Times continued, “at first glance a tale of love and lust but from a distance is clearly a symbolic rendering of the benefits and drawbacks of switching from a socialist to a market economy.”

You can read “The Paprika Ewer,” an excerpt from Valeria’s Last Stand, on Fictionaut.

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Brendan Halpin is the author of novels for both adults (Dear Catastrophe Waitress, Donorboy) and young adults (Forever Changes, How Ya Like Me Now.) His latest — and possibly last — book for grown-ups is I Can See Clearly Now, the story of a group of idealistic musicians who, in 1972, hole up in a New York studio to record songs for an educational TV show. Publishers Weekly called the book “clever and infectious.”

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“How satisfying to watch Erlbaum survive adolescence and produce a smart, engaging book,” The New York Times Book Review wrote about Janice Erlbaum‘s memoir Girlbomb: A Halfway Homeless Memoir. In 2008, Janice chronicled her return to the shelter where she had lived as a teenager in Have You Found Her.

This Friday, she will host the ten-year-anniversary of Girls Education and Mentoring Service (GEMS) at the Bowery Poetry Club.

“Kafka wrote that a book must be the axe to the frozen sea inside us. Ginnah Howard‘s astonishing debut novel, Night Navigation, is just such an axe: sharp and fierce, enlivening and enlightening. Howard’s gripping tale of a mother who can’t stop saving the very son who can’t be saved lays bare the marrow of familial love–its messy desperation and its stubborn, enduring beauty.” So says Maud Casey, author of Genealogy and The Shape of Things To Come.

According to Kirkus, Night Navigation “takes us into the deranged, darkly humorous world of the addict—from break-your-arm-dealers, to boot-camp rehabs, to Rumi-spouting NA sponsors.” Ginnah posted the opening chapter to Fictionaut. Her official website is GinnahHoward.com.

Previously:

• Fictionauts at Large, 4/15
• Interview with Frederick Barthelme
• Fictionaut Five: Jedediah Berry

Jedediah Berry‘s “distinctively surreal whodunit” (SF Chronicle) The Manual of Detection has earned him comparisons with Franz Kafka, Ray Bradbury, Jorge Louis Borges, and Terry Gilliam. Kirkus called it “a boldly inventive deconstruction of Cartesian metaphysics, the criminal-justice system and the well-oiled detective story,” and Sarah Weinman wrote “I succumbed to the whimsy and wonder of what was inside…. Fall down the rabbit holes. Search for the missing alarm clocks. And prepare to expand your mind even a smidgen.” Read more…

Recently: Fictionauts at Large, David Shields: Reality Hunger

“They snap shut with the satisfying click of the sleekest compact; they break open like perfectly shivered glass; they diagnose and recompose the heart’s and mind’s movements with a clinical yet sensual precision: these are Elizabeth Skurnick’s poems.” So says Maureen N. McLane in a new introduction to Lizzie Skurnick‘s collection Check-In, recently reissued by Caketrain. The expanded second edition features 14 new poems.

Lizzie will be reading with Kate Christensen and Maud Newton at the Housing Works Cafe in New York on April 15. “You Could Marry Anyone” is a poem Lizzie started on Fictionaut and was just able to sneak into the book.

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“The funniest books I’ve ever read are Lolita and American Psycho,” Nick Antosca confesses in an interview with Tao Lin. Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that Elizabeth Hand describes his second novel Midnight Picnic (Word Riot), a book based on dreams and set in the afterlife, as “a riveting and terrifying 21st Century Book of the Dead that’s one of the most frightening novels I’ve read in years.” Midnight Picnic, just released, is the followup to Antosca’s 2006 novel Fires.

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Michael Kimball‘s epistolary third novel, Dear Everybody, was greeted with rave reviews. The Believer called it a “curatorial masterpiece,” Time Out New York refers to the “stunning prose” that “evocatively hints at entire physical and emotional worlds lying just behind his story’s surface,” and the LA Times argues that “there is a whole life contained in this slim novel, a life as funny and warm and sad and heartbreaking as any other, rendered with honest complexity and freshness by Kimball’s sharp writing.” And the trailer‘s a thing of beauty, too.

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“Barry Graham’s stories are little cries for help from way in the corners and deep in the cracks of contemporary fiction,” says Jeff Parker, author of Ovenman. Who among those who’ve read “DICKEY DEW,” “BLACKHORSE,” or any of Barry’s other stories on Fictionaut would disagree?

Another Sky Press just released Barry’s debut collection The National Virginity Pledge: Short Stories and Other Lies, which you can order from Amazon or directly from the publisher. Barry is a four-time National Tic Tac Toe Association champion and fiction editor of Dogzplot.

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