I was on vacation in San Francisco recently and one of the necessary items on my to-do list was a pilgrimage to City Lights Books. While perusing the shelves, I spied a signed copy of Daniel Granbois’ Unlucky Lucky Days. Knowing the man’s name and having heard great things about him from trustworthy people, I decided to plunk down some hard-earned cash.
Grandbois gave me my money’s worth. Even though it is a slim book at 117 pages, Unlucky Lucky Days is packed with 73 short tales. The longest maxes out at three pages, the shortest three sentences. Each one shows a writer so comfortable in his own skin, that he appears flawless at times. Granbois plays around with characters and prose in unique and inventive ways, creating his own genre of absurdist fiction populated with dead (or soon to be dying) humans, living everyday objects, and sentient wild creatures. There are mirrors that long for a different perspective, revenge-seeking middle fingers, and storytelling balls of yarn, all of whom live and breathe as much as any of the human characters in the book.
Read the rest of this entry »
