Reality and delusion collide in this hilariously tragic novel about one family's absurd secrets and the dreams they hide.
Reality and delusion collide in this hilariously tragic novel about one family's absurd secrets and the dreams they hide.
Absurdist, Humorous (general), Literary
Reality and delusion collide in this hilariously tragic story about one family's absurd secrets and the dreams they hide. The Day Aunt Gina Came to Town is a literary black comedy that puts a playful spin on the idea that 'we are what we pretend to be.' Taking its cue from surrealist notions of a reality substantially conjured by the unconscious, this novel examines the private and separate ways we construct and experience our lives among those closest to us.
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John Schoneboom is a wonderful storyteller and a unique voice in contemporary fiction. With the same surreal, madcap, and wildly inventive style that made his earlier novel Fontoon such a joy, he now tells the story of an ordinary family who may or may not be involved in global politics, alien telepathy, the sex-life of Edward VII, and the singing career of Johnny Mathis, and whose eponymous aunt is as elusive as the Higgs boson. Leave logic behind and prepare to be enthralled by this multifaceted comedy of everyday life in a universe that could almost be our own, but not quite. ~ Andrew Crumey, author of Beethoven's Assassins
Praise for Surrealpolitik: A fierce, lucid intervention against the regime of an exclusionary "realism" which, in its marginalization of the dreamlife, not only starves us with a deadly-dull aesthetics but forms a lid clamped on the imaginative urgencies required to fight our way into a post-capitalist, post-surveillance future. ~ Jonathan Lethem
Praise for Fontoon: A comic tour de force! ~ David Whetstone, The Journal
