An Elliptical Collision of Worlds: K Chess’s “Famous Men Who Never Lived,” Reviewed

Metaphors are a tricky thing. In the sense of K Chess’s novel Famous Men Who Never Lived, I mean that literally: its central conceit eventually turns out to be a sort of magic trick, in the sense of misdirection and revelation. At the heart of Chess’s book is a displaced population: a group of residents from a parallel Earth who find themselves refugees in a familiar place: contemporary New York. (For this reader, it was very familiar: lengthy sequences play out in several locations less than a mile from my apartment.) But while this idea might seem like grounds for a sweeping, thematically resonant work of fiction challenging readers’ ideas about refugee narratives, that’s not exactly what Chess is after here.

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Vol.1 Brooklyn’s March 2019 Book Preview

What literary delights does March bring? A number of books we’ve been awaiting eagerly for years, for one thing, including new works by Mitchell S. Jackson and Seth Fried. A host of ambitious literary debuts as well — and a number of collections of short fiction that push at the limits of storytelling. Here’s a look at some of the March books we’re looking forward to the most. 

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