review
With his characteristic blend of grotesque imagination, beguiling detail, rich allusion and stylistic flair, Setz has followed up his award-winning novels with a remarkably versatile and intriguing collection of short stories.
Business cards develop welts and infect other objects with corrosion; a woman lives in an apartment on a Ferris wheel; a wife demands that her reluctant husband lock her in a cage. In Setzâs fiction, the line between tenderness and horror constantly wavers. There is mesmerising beauty and lyricism in his details, and he has a knack for striking images and similes. Sometimes his metaphors are so apt that it seems amazing no one ever thought of them before: in Manhattan, one character has the feeling of âturning the pages of a book when he walked northward through the streets with their ascending numbersâ.
Setzâs elegant and meticulous craft, his understated transitions between the everyday and the fantastic, the simple grace of his sentences, the precision of his imagery, the empathetic depiction of his charactersâ all-too-human idiosyncrasies, and his revelatory approach to mundane detail have established him as a young author of great distinction.
All recommendations from Spring 2011