Praise for CORRECTION:
"Blackwell has created an unsettling new kind of realism in this collection of flash-point shorts. At almost every page I found myself saying, “Well, this can’t be real,” while at the same time struggling to reconcile myself with the sheer familiarity of all these humans at their absurd and befuddled worst. I, too, had clicked on some of the headlines that informed these stories, but that was not what made this book so disconcertingly familiar. Rather, what I saw in CORRECTION was what I least wanted to see there: my own self looking back out at me. Blackwell has created the strangest of mirrors: a book that crackles with the compulsive voyeurism of the internet age tempered by the lens of that most relentless of companions—the self-reflective ‘I am.’"
-Sarah Blackman
"WTF is this book exactly? It’s a compliment to the book that I can’t tell if these stories are found or made and in what proportion. Reading them gave me an unsettled and jittery feeling, like I was seeing too much of our world too rapidly, and just as I get a satisfying glimpse of a life or a state of being, it turns into something else and leaves me dazzled. CORRECTION feels true and it feels like now."
- Ander Monson
"Cut Zola (who took the sociopolitical temperature of the times and was shrewd about people, aware of their size) with Gari Lutz who makes a sentence crackle to matter. Add work that splashes around in the apocalypse of our mutilated attention (the Internet), like Mark Doten’s Trump Sky Alpha, and increase with a pure injection of something like a Yahoo! News stream where the personal, the celebrity, the horror, smacks its lips at politics—here are 101 ideas for how to write a short story without redemption because we all know where we’re heading. Blackwell offers this, a series of taut windows that are mirrors that are all screens. We need new ideas about how to write stories given the window/mirror/screen/apocalypse thing and ever-new ways to hallow, hold, mutate and use attention—this helps."
-Caren Beilin
"CORRECTION does more than just acknowledge the internet—it displays the multifaceted way in which the internet has changed our thinking. These flash-point stories capture tragic, convoluted, and often hauntingly realistic episodes, where never just one thing is happening. [ . . ] These are stories without absolution, without a singular central move, and like his unfurling prose, roll forward relentlessly, pressing us to accept and build alongside Blackwell and his chorus of speakers."
-Gillian Perry, Heavy Feather Review
"Gabriel Blackwell’s searing new work, CORRECTION: 101 Readymades, may be the closest anyone’s come to capturing the bleak unsettling strangeness of American consciousness in the age of social media. The book, a rollercoaster ride of recursions, functions like a “Great American Novel” purged of pesky constraints like the delay-of-desire and labored exposition."
-Kevin Tasker, Cleveland Review of Books
*
Buy now from Rescue Press.
Buy a signed copy.
"Blackwell has created an unsettling new kind of realism in this collection of flash-point shorts. At almost every page I found myself saying, “Well, this can’t be real,” while at the same time struggling to reconcile myself with the sheer familiarity of all these humans at their absurd and befuddled worst. I, too, had clicked on some of the headlines that informed these stories, but that was not what made this book so disconcertingly familiar. Rather, what I saw in CORRECTION was what I least wanted to see there: my own self looking back out at me. Blackwell has created the strangest of mirrors: a book that crackles with the compulsive voyeurism of the internet age tempered by the lens of that most relentless of companions—the self-reflective ‘I am.’"
-Sarah Blackman
"WTF is this book exactly? It’s a compliment to the book that I can’t tell if these stories are found or made and in what proportion. Reading them gave me an unsettled and jittery feeling, like I was seeing too much of our world too rapidly, and just as I get a satisfying glimpse of a life or a state of being, it turns into something else and leaves me dazzled. CORRECTION feels true and it feels like now."
- Ander Monson
"Cut Zola (who took the sociopolitical temperature of the times and was shrewd about people, aware of their size) with Gari Lutz who makes a sentence crackle to matter. Add work that splashes around in the apocalypse of our mutilated attention (the Internet), like Mark Doten’s Trump Sky Alpha, and increase with a pure injection of something like a Yahoo! News stream where the personal, the celebrity, the horror, smacks its lips at politics—here are 101 ideas for how to write a short story without redemption because we all know where we’re heading. Blackwell offers this, a series of taut windows that are mirrors that are all screens. We need new ideas about how to write stories given the window/mirror/screen/apocalypse thing and ever-new ways to hallow, hold, mutate and use attention—this helps."
-Caren Beilin
"CORRECTION does more than just acknowledge the internet—it displays the multifaceted way in which the internet has changed our thinking. These flash-point stories capture tragic, convoluted, and often hauntingly realistic episodes, where never just one thing is happening. [ . . ] These are stories without absolution, without a singular central move, and like his unfurling prose, roll forward relentlessly, pressing us to accept and build alongside Blackwell and his chorus of speakers."
-Gillian Perry, Heavy Feather Review
"Gabriel Blackwell’s searing new work, CORRECTION: 101 Readymades, may be the closest anyone’s come to capturing the bleak unsettling strangeness of American consciousness in the age of social media. The book, a rollercoaster ride of recursions, functions like a “Great American Novel” purged of pesky constraints like the delay-of-desire and labored exposition."
-Kevin Tasker, Cleveland Review of Books
*
Buy now from Rescue Press.
Buy a signed copy.
Excerpts available online:
Read "CEREMONY" and "BLUE LIGHT" at Puerto del Sol.
Read "ON THE M TRAIN, SATURDAY" and "PERFORMANCE" at DIAGRAM.
Read "FAITH" at wigleaf.
Read "SCENERY" and "BEDTIME" at new sinews.
Read "WHAT IS THIS THING?" at Passages North.
Read "OVERNIGHT," "HOW THE HUSBAND AND THE WIFE PARTED WAYS," and "FASCINATING AND DISGUSTING" at Juked.
Read "CEREMONY" and "BLUE LIGHT" at Puerto del Sol.
Read "ON THE M TRAIN, SATURDAY" and "PERFORMANCE" at DIAGRAM.
Read "FAITH" at wigleaf.
Read "SCENERY" and "BEDTIME" at new sinews.
Read "WHAT IS THIS THING?" at Passages North.
Read "OVERNIGHT," "HOW THE HUSBAND AND THE WIFE PARTED WAYS," and "FASCINATING AND DISGUSTING" at Juked.
