Praise for Critique of Pure Reason:
"Unique and compelling as the very souls they depict—from the unknown to the famous to the infamous—these stories are wildly inventive, sly, astute. There's a bit of Sir Thomas Browne (Borges, too) for the twenty-first century in these wizardly, magical narratives. The notion of "pure reason" has rarely had a more subtle, comical, yet deeply humane alchemist at work in the great lab of fiction than Gabriel Blackwell."
-Bradford Morrow, author of The Diviner's Tale and The Uninnocent
"In Critique of Pure Reason, Gabriel Blackwell bends found forms to story, repurposes history, sets mathematics and a programmer's logic to generating emotion and wonder. This is the work of a talented storyteller slyly taking the stance of a documentary filmmaker, or else of a first-rate bureaucrat, perhaps rising quickly through our Ministry of Imagination—and with each new diagram and footnote and well-made sentence the philosopher in Blackwell provides us another piece of that most illusive of proofs, a verification of our shared humanity, captured here in all its absurdity and horror and glory."
-Matt Bell, author of In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods
"Gabriel Blackwell's Critique of Pure Reason is a transgeneric textual labyrinth. Readers will take great pleasure in wandering these peculiar dark halls, encountering the shadows of Raymond Chandler, Sid Vicious, The Marx Brothers and David Lynch, to name a few."
-Adam McOmber, author of The White Forest and This New & Poisonous Air
"Critique of Pure Reason is an ark captained by a mad genius who has summoned—from the depths of his wild imagination—a vast and stunning species of fictional forms and set them adrift upon a relentless flood. Cerebral, lyrical, mischievous, and hypnotic, these stories pulse with the focused urgency of creatures who, having survived an event of apocalyptic proportions, are now determined to thrive."
-Matthew Vollmer, author of inscriptions for headstones and Future Missionaries of America
Reviews:
"Critique of Pure Reason gazes out imposingly, with a title that suggests philosophical history and the potential of madness both. Blackwell uses nonfictional techniques to tell decidedly surreal accounts: one early work uses a Lawrence Wescheler-esque comparison of a contemporary photograph to centuries-old art to gradually unravel a sinister account of doppelgangers and conspiracy. There’s also a story of Raymond Chandler becoming enmeshed in a kind of proto-noir plotline that anticipates his book Shadow Man, as well as a discussion of David Lynch that slowly becomes an account of a much earlier attempt to tell the story of Joseph Merrick on film. It’s heady and often thrilling work, the satisfaction of the known giving way to gasps as expected borders begin to give way."
-Tobias Carroll, Vol. 1 Brooklyn
""[Critique of Pure Reason is] an irreverent panoply brimming with mysteries, riddles, and games, both as narrative function and theme. Is Blackwell a satirist, an escapist, a nihilist? He's a poet-critic, folding his philosophy into triumphant malapropisms."
-Greg Gerke, Review of Contemporary Fiction
"The stories collected in Gabriel Blackwell’s Critique Of Pure Reason are compact, organic-yet-animatedly-inorganic, implausibly authentic, loosely alien, unguessably intelligent (or not), possibly parasitic, and more infra-dimensional than inter-, a concrete allusion and a shell of a phantom menace. Taken as a whole—a pack? a swarm? a colony?—these stories also constitute one of the more boldly conceived and sustained applications of metafictional aesthetics to appear in quite some time. Critique Of Pure Reason is filled with highly readable experiments in story that do not do what short stories are typically expected to do."
-Joe Milazzo, Entropy
Order from Noemi Press
"Unique and compelling as the very souls they depict—from the unknown to the famous to the infamous—these stories are wildly inventive, sly, astute. There's a bit of Sir Thomas Browne (Borges, too) for the twenty-first century in these wizardly, magical narratives. The notion of "pure reason" has rarely had a more subtle, comical, yet deeply humane alchemist at work in the great lab of fiction than Gabriel Blackwell."
-Bradford Morrow, author of The Diviner's Tale and The Uninnocent
"In Critique of Pure Reason, Gabriel Blackwell bends found forms to story, repurposes history, sets mathematics and a programmer's logic to generating emotion and wonder. This is the work of a talented storyteller slyly taking the stance of a documentary filmmaker, or else of a first-rate bureaucrat, perhaps rising quickly through our Ministry of Imagination—and with each new diagram and footnote and well-made sentence the philosopher in Blackwell provides us another piece of that most illusive of proofs, a verification of our shared humanity, captured here in all its absurdity and horror and glory."
-Matt Bell, author of In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods
"Gabriel Blackwell's Critique of Pure Reason is a transgeneric textual labyrinth. Readers will take great pleasure in wandering these peculiar dark halls, encountering the shadows of Raymond Chandler, Sid Vicious, The Marx Brothers and David Lynch, to name a few."
-Adam McOmber, author of The White Forest and This New & Poisonous Air
"Critique of Pure Reason is an ark captained by a mad genius who has summoned—from the depths of his wild imagination—a vast and stunning species of fictional forms and set them adrift upon a relentless flood. Cerebral, lyrical, mischievous, and hypnotic, these stories pulse with the focused urgency of creatures who, having survived an event of apocalyptic proportions, are now determined to thrive."
-Matthew Vollmer, author of inscriptions for headstones and Future Missionaries of America
Reviews:
"Critique of Pure Reason gazes out imposingly, with a title that suggests philosophical history and the potential of madness both. Blackwell uses nonfictional techniques to tell decidedly surreal accounts: one early work uses a Lawrence Wescheler-esque comparison of a contemporary photograph to centuries-old art to gradually unravel a sinister account of doppelgangers and conspiracy. There’s also a story of Raymond Chandler becoming enmeshed in a kind of proto-noir plotline that anticipates his book Shadow Man, as well as a discussion of David Lynch that slowly becomes an account of a much earlier attempt to tell the story of Joseph Merrick on film. It’s heady and often thrilling work, the satisfaction of the known giving way to gasps as expected borders begin to give way."
-Tobias Carroll, Vol. 1 Brooklyn
""[Critique of Pure Reason is] an irreverent panoply brimming with mysteries, riddles, and games, both as narrative function and theme. Is Blackwell a satirist, an escapist, a nihilist? He's a poet-critic, folding his philosophy into triumphant malapropisms."
-Greg Gerke, Review of Contemporary Fiction
"The stories collected in Gabriel Blackwell’s Critique Of Pure Reason are compact, organic-yet-animatedly-inorganic, implausibly authentic, loosely alien, unguessably intelligent (or not), possibly parasitic, and more infra-dimensional than inter-, a concrete allusion and a shell of a phantom menace. Taken as a whole—a pack? a swarm? a colony?—these stories also constitute one of the more boldly conceived and sustained applications of metafictional aesthetics to appear in quite some time. Critique Of Pure Reason is filled with highly readable experiments in story that do not do what short stories are typically expected to do."
-Joe Milazzo, Entropy
Order from Noemi Press
