When He Sprang From His Bed, Staggered Backward, And Fell Dead, We Clung Together With Faint Hearts, And Mutely Questioned Each Other

Product Description

Fiction. Winner of the GMR Book Prize. Christopher Kang’s extraordinary collection,
When He Sprang From His Bed, Staggered Backward, And Fell Dead, We Clung Together With Faint Hearts, And Mutely Questioned Each Other, resists easy classification. A daring, remarkable book that challenges on every read. These 880 stories taken together form a kind of sly, wondrous narrative whole, full in equal measure of humor, sadness, and brilliance. Kang is an ambitious writer, and this book is an achievement. Each of these stories contains a world, tilted on its own axis, strange, remarkable and bursting with heart.

Review

“Christopher Kang’s brilliant first book, a steady accretion of Robert Walserian feuilletons, filled me with such quick strobes of delight and confusion and dismay and envy that, in the end, I mostly felt vertigo. This book is sly; it contains its own contradictions. It is a searing indictment of artistic ambition while being nakedly ambitious; it is self-reflective without a steady self to reflect; it is simultaneously starkly clear and confounding; and its intelligence is often punctured by humor and sentiment and near-aphorisms that ring so quietly and personally that I often wanted to write them in permanent marker on my skin.” 
―Lauren Groff

“Christopher Kang’s work is mysterious, lovelorn, philosophical and often very amusing. Its lyricism is matched only by its daring. A remarkable book.” 
―
Lorrie Moore

“These tiny novels or are they prose poems or pieces of a particle theory never let their genre indeterminacy cause blurring. Vivid as sword-thrusts, stroboscopic as a fall from a sudden precipice, marvelously stark as the outline of a pride of lions on the horizon, this book, sparkling like a bag of jewels, offers us the opportunity to live many lives without all those interstitial fascia. How about a shot of tequila? How about 880?” 
―
Dean Young

“Not quite like anything else I’ve read . . . A wonderful book that defies attempts at tidy description and reveals more with each rereading.” ―
The Collagist

“These pieces are sharp verses in a song of shape and motion, of the making of human moments, of the setting and spirit of human lives. Categorically elusive, this stunning work is best known by experiencing it.” ―
Small Press Book Review

“It’s fitting that Kang’s
When He Sprang From His Bed… was selected as the winner of the 2016 Green Mountains Review Book Prize by none other than Sarah Manguso, as Kang’s book has a similar premise to Manguso’s own book,
300 Arguments. While Kang’s collection is made up of micro stories and Manguso’s collection is made up of micro essays, the ability of their respective authors to compress a thought, an idea, a story, or an argument into just a few words or lines is quite remarkable.”
―Necessary Fiction

“Like the uniform human figures in the art of Keith Haring but burdened by the desire to make art themselves, the characters in Kang’s work have a sublime anonymity that serves as an efficient explanation of why anyone makes anything: to bang on our own drums, with all our messy ambitions and half-conceived ideas, in the hopes of contributing something meaningful to a broader human music.” ―
Rain Taxi

“Christopher Kang establishes his place within a particular literary tradition of experimental writers while at the same time carving out his own path.” ―
Entropy Magazine

About the Author

Christopher Kang earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His short fiction and poetry have appeared in
jubilat,
Massachusetts
Review,
Gulf
Coast,
The
L
Magazine,
Verse Daily,
Cimarron Review,
Columbia: A Journal of Literature and
Art, and
Open
City. He is currently a PhD student in English Literature at the University of California-Irvine.