Brett Josef Grubisic

The distinctive voice narrating Black Deutschland compels an audience to listen. Coupled with the foregrounded erudition and the seen-it-all, felt-it-all, tried-it-all, and lost-it-all world-weariness, there’s a nocturnal theatricality in ample evidence, a stylized posture that would not seem out of place in a cabaret performance. “Guten abend, meine Damen und Herren,” the well-past-youthful performer might begin, spotlit on a bar stool but otherwise unaccompanied on a tiny curtained stage. “Let me tell you of my former days, of my not untroubled stay in a grey and wintry German city, of fleeting love and enduring loss, of the night the Wall […]

A darkly hallucinatory and unsettling fever-dream of a novel, Lord Byron’s Prophecy offers doppelgängers, apocalyptic visions, ominous portents, and eerie hauntings as it recounts a centuries-spanning tale of guilt–and appetite–driven men whose suppressed secrets and illicit desires poison their own lives and those around them. With a kaleidoscopic, continent-crossing narrating technique that leap-frogs between 1816, 1960, 2010, and 2027; Sean Eads (The Survivors) makes a case—a gothic-veined and sporadically operatic one—for what Freud called the return of the repressed. Set in various American and European locales, the prismatic story opens with Adam Fane, a deeply miserable, raving, and semi-delirious English […]