"There is a great imagination at work in the brilliant Collected Alex, a fiction that becomes increasingly complex in each of its three parts, the narrative turning inward and outward at different points, reaching an apex that is at once cerebral and visceral." - Michael Kimball, author of Big Ray * "A. T. Grant's debut is a haunting, a bildungsroman in which a boy's parents give him a dead body to carry, to care for, to befriend. The book sits on your neck, an immobile mass ghosting you down, compressing your spine: you dress the body, you feed it, the banal made enticing, talk to it, become brothers. Collected Alex is a simple theme that fugues an intricate, magical, sophisticated, urgent, gorgeous eidolon. Grant's words clamp on and refuse absolution."
- Lily Hoang, author of Changing
"If Charlie Kaufman and David Lynch wrote an earnest Buddhist parable together, it might read like Collected Alex. The story feels accessible and elegant, like an allegory about today written by a lonely scholar a thousand years ahead. It's beautiful."
- Ken Baumann, author of Solip
"Lovers of misterio autentico will find in Collected Alex a blissful experience. The flowing, deadpan narration of bizarre events leads not to the resolution of a made-up conflict but to something much, much better: the warmth that comes to the soul when it relaxes in good company."
- Jim Woodring, author of Congress of the Animals
Collected Alex was the winning manuscript in the 2012 Caketrain Chapbook Competition, as judged by Michael Kimball.
"There is a great imagination at work in the brilliant Collected Alex, a fiction that becomes increasingly complex in each of its three parts, the narrative turning inward and outward at different points, reaching an apex that is at once cerebral and visceral." - Michael Kimball, author of Big Ray * "A. T. Grant's debut is a haunting, a bildungsroman in which a boy's parents give him a dead body to carry, to care for, to befriend. The book sits on your neck, an immobile mass ghosting you down, compressing your spine: you dress the body, you feed it, the banal made enticing, talk to it, become brothers. Collected Alex is a simple theme that fugues an intricate, magical, sophisticated, urgent, gorgeous eidolon. Grant's words clamp on and refuse absolution."
- Lily Hoang, author of Changing
"If Charlie Kaufman and David Lynch wrote an earnest Buddhist parable together, it might read like Collected Alex. The story feels accessible and elegant, like an allegory about today written by a lonely scholar a thousand years ahead. It's beautiful."
- Ken Baumann, author of Solip
"Lovers of misterio autentico will find in Collected Alex a blissful experience. The flowing, deadpan narration of bizarre events leads not to the resolution of a made-up conflict but to something much, much better: the warmth that comes to the soul when it relaxes in good company."
- Jim Woodring, author of Congress of the Animals
Collected Alex was the winning manuscript in the 2012 Caketrain Chapbook Competition, as judged by Michael Kimball.