From the author of the brilliant debut novella "Short Lean Cuts" comes this highly anticipated comprehensive collection of 70 short stories, poems, and art.
In his first collection, Pruteanu delivers a series of fictitious "cogs" which grind together and move forward with the momentum and impact of a speeding freight train. Reminiscent of Kafka and Camus and even the great Russian novelists, Pruteanu displays that rarest ability to create believable and entertaining allegory, while at the same time deftly omitting crucial elements, allowing the reader to interpret his or her own meaning. The result is a series of machinations on love and death, oppression and adversity, identity and purpose; in effect, the machine strips away our options-and the world opens up.
ADVANCE PRAISE FOR GEARS
""Gears" is an unforgettable collection that strikes a match, lighting up the shadows of Gogol and Vonnegut in more than a few raucous smokes together. Pruteanu is a master of language, character and submersion. "Gears" is deep waters. Get ready to go under."
-Meg Tuite, author of "Domestic Apparition and Implosion"
"Reading Pruteanu, you can't help but imagine a big-hearted and wild-eyed writer on the end of the line, one of the rare few who gives a damn. His writing makes you feel less strange and less alone, not an easy trick to pull off."
-James A. Reeves, author of "The Road to Somewhere: An American Memoir"
"Reading Alex Pruteanu's "Gears" is like taking refuge in a restroom in the Denver airport during a tornado warning, and meeting a weirdly enchanting exile who tells stories and word puzzles that remind you that the spinning vortices of life are inside as well as outside: sometimes they are on the scale of clouds and states, and other times they are the size and shape of the subtlest contradictions."
-Christopher Schaberg, author of "The Textual Life of Airports: Reading the Culture of Flight"