Art WinslowThis review by Joy Williams of Jim Gauer's novel Novel Explosives is spot-on: it's an astoundingly good book that should be on your radar but almost certainly is not. It's extremely playful and dead serious at the same time. The amnesiac narrator thinks he's a heteronym of Fernando Pessoa's, since that's what his ID tells him. Let Williams explain it better than I have the space to here.
https://books.substack.com/p/review-joy-williams-on-jim-gauer
Review: Joy Williams on Jim Gauer
"Novel Explosives" is a big burning turning ferris wheel of a book with many colorful capsules of expertise and pods of excess. It is violent and profound, taunting, outraged. It is arrogantly discursive yet can possess the focused intensity of a knife’s tip.