The Din of Celestial Birds by Brian Evenson

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Front cover artwork by Frank Walls

Though published second after Altmann's Tongue, The Din of Celestial Birds (1997) consists of the best of Evenson's early stories. They take place in a country (perhaps several countries) that seems at once everywhere and nowhere, haunted by birds, ghosts, poverty, abuse, tyranny, and the permeability of the line between the living and the dead. These stories offer a heady mix of absurdity and bleakness on the one hand and exuberant magic realism on the other. In one, a character imagines that a bird has been calling his name for six consecutive nights—and perhaps a bird actually has. A dead child is brought back to a stuttering and troubling life, while a dictator refuses to admit that he is dead even as he is being buried. A scientist works in isolation to try to cheat death. An ex-Nazi wanders in and out of the jungle, having become a different sort of nightmare. These stories offer the gestures and satisfactions that would come to define Evenson's later work, but also suggest other paths he might have taken and reveal how indebted his fiction is to writers such as Ben Okri, Gabriel García Márquez, Sony Labou Tansi, and writers of the Latin American Boom. And as Leslie Norris suggests, "They are written, too, in a faultlessly efficient prose, so we see these strange worlds in the clearest and coldest of lights."

This new edition adds eleven additional uncollected stories to the seventeen that made up the first edition, as well as insightful story notes by the author. An essential volume for any serious fans of Evenson's fiction.

EDITIONS

Signed & Lettered Deluxe Hardcover Edition with Slipcase

• Signed by Author and Artist
  
• Hand-Lettered A to Z
  
• Front cover artwork by Frank Walls
• Color Dust Jacket
  
• Front Cover and Spine Stampings
  
• Limited to 26 Signed and Lettered Hardcover Editions
  
• Slipcase:  Yes!
  
• SOLD OUT!

PRAISE FOR BRIAN EVENSON

“Evenson’s little nightmares are deftly crafted, stylistically daring, and surprisingly emotional.”
- Kirkus Reviews

“… the kind of writer who leads you into the labyrinth, then abandons you there. It’s hard to believe a guy can be so frightening, so consistently.”
- The New York Times

“To read Evenson is to be privy to a precise, vivid, brilliant unpicking of the everyday—and its others.”
- China Miéville

“Brian Evenson is one of my favorite living horror writers.”
- Carmen Maria Machado

“Evenson’s fiction is equal parts obsessive, experimental, and violent. It can be soul-shaking.”
- The New Yorker

“Brian Evenson is one of the treasures of American story writing, a true successor both to the generation of Coover, Barthelme, Hawkes and Co., but also to Edgar Allan Poe.”
- Jonathan Lethem

“There is not a more intense, prolific, or apocalyptic writer of fiction in America than Brian Evenson.”
- George Saunders

“His stories are deeply terrifying and so troubling that they linger in your mind long after you’ve read them.”
- R.L. Stine, creator of Goosebumps

“Brian Evenson is the Donald Barthelme of psychological horror.”
- Los Angeles Times

“Evenson is one of our best living writers—regardless of genre.” —NPR

“Few things in literature aren’t up for debate, but the fact that Brian Evenson is among the most versatile and accomplished writers of contemporary American fiction is one of them.”
- Gabino Iglesias

“Like with Borges or Kafka, every one of Brian Evenson’s stories are a whole world distilled down to a few pages, and rendered in a pointillism that feels not just abstract, but cosmic, yet is gritty all the same, and leaves a distinct, bloody residue in your mind, in your heart. And then you can no longer look at the world the way you used to.”
- Stephen Graham Jones