Logic of the World and Other Fictions

There is such beauty and mystery and surprise on the path we are seductively invited to follow in Robert Kelly's The Logic of the World. Do not miss this deeply charmed and haunting foray." — Carole Maso, author of AVA ​The thirty works in this fifth collection of short fictions trespass knowingly into fictional realms of droll lyricism, audacious description, studied anachronism, sensual immediacy and subtle compassion. In one, a woman waits at a window for the moon to return her body; another story reveals the triple identity of Don Juan; in still another, an itinerant tragedian invents a dangerous form of theatrical performance; and in the title story a dragon questions a youthful knight's errancy, as well as his sanity. Scattered throughout are nine pieces known as "sudden fiction," a genre Kelly named, while other tales appear in the guises of myths, letters, rituals, and even dreams. Four previous volumes of Robert Kelly's manifestly original fictions have been hailed as "exhilarating…full of signs and wonders" in the New York Times Book Review, "sparking, multiform, yet indivisible" in American Book Review, and "tantalizing, unsettling" in the Review of Contemporary Fiction. ALA Choice rightly points to his "affinities with the writings of Borges, Nabokov, Calvino, and Coover."