Matt Vadnais

All I Can Truly Deliver Matt Vadnais

What I love most about each of these enigmatic, glistery, beautiful, and intricately inventive stories is their valuable celebration of and commitment to the Difficult Imagination. Comprised of skewed appropriations and manipulations of "canonical" work by the likes of Melville, Kafka, and Joyce, this collection reminds us again and again of two profound points: that "originality" and "truth" are, at best, states of mind, and that loss and death remain the only two things we'll never really be able to deconstruct. All I Can Truly Deliver marks the arrival of an important new talent to the festival called exploratory fiction. -- Lance Olsen There is the world and then there is the world. In his "Cover Stories" Matt Vadnais uncovers the paradox of "realistic" fiction. One need not go out and bring 'em back alive when one has the more real and inventive terrain of the library. Write what you know goes the verisimilitude saw, and All I Can Truly Deliver knows what it know. These stories are maps more detailed than the merely real things they represent. --Michael Martone In his deeply imagined, skilfully crafted first collection, Matt Vadnais demonstrates the vitality of the fiction canon as well as the versatility, the possibility, that fiction can achieve in the 21st century. -- Mary Clearman Blew