Counternarratives

by John Keene

Overview

Now in paperback, a bewitching collection of stories and novellas that are “suspenseful, thought-provoking, mystical, and haunting” (Publishers Weekly)

Ranging from the seventeenth century to the present, and crossing multiple continents, Counternarratives draws upon memoirs, newspaper accounts, detective stories, and interrogation transcripts to create new and strange perspectives on our past and present. “An Outtake” chronicles an escaped slave’s take on liberty and the American Revolution; “The Strange History of Our Lady of the Sorrows” presents a bizarre series of events that unfold in Haiti and a nineteenth-century Kentucky convent; “The Aeronauts” soars between bustling Philadelphia, still-rustic Washington, and the theater of the U. S. Civil War; “Rivers” portrays a free Jim meeting up decades later with his former raftmate Huckleberry Finn; and in “Acrobatique,” the subject of a famous Edgar Degas painting talks back.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811225526
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	05/17/2016
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	397,728
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

John Keene is the author, co-author, and translator of a handful of books, including Annotations (1995) and Counternarratives (2015), both published by New Directions. Counternarratives received an American Book Award, a Lannan Literary Award, a Republic of Consciousness Prize (UK), and a Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction. His most recent publication, Punks: New & Selected Poems (The Song Cave, 2021),received the 2022 National Book Award for Poetry, the Thom Gunn Award from the Publishing Triangle and a 2022 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. A 2018 MacArthur Fellow, he is Distinguished Professor and serves as department chair at Rutgers University-Newark

Editorial Reviews

"Counternarratives is an extraordinary work of literature. John Keene is a dense, intricate, and magnificent writer."

Harper’s - Christine Smallwood

"Keene exerts superb control over his stories, costuming them in the style of Jorge Luis Borges. Yet he preserves the undercurrent of excitement and pathos that accompanies his characters’ persecution and their groping toward freedom."

The Wall Street Journal - Sam Sacks

"Of the scope of William T. Vollmann or Samuel R. Delany, but with a kaleidoscopic intuition all its own, Counternarratives is very easily one of the most vividly imagined and vitally timed books of the year. I haven’t felt so refreshed in quite a while as a reader."

Vice - Blake Butler

03/30/2015
In his latest, Keene (Annotations) offers a collection of complex, genre-defying stories, focusing primarily on the range and variety of the black experience. Unrolling chronologically across three sections—the first set in earlier eras, such as 17th-century Brazil and revolutionary America; the second set mostly in mid-19th- to early-20th-century America; and the third in modern-day Africa—these stories interrogate the meanings of identity, agency, duty, and freedom within each period. Keene not only references an impressive range of facts, but also subverts them. Some stories draw on the counternarrative tradition in magical realism, as when slaves use magical powers to attain freedom in "A Letter on the Trials of the Counterreformation in New Lisbon" and in the particularly unforgettable revenge fantasy "Gloss, or the Strange History of Our Lady of the Sorrows." Other stories disrupt form as well as content, as in the experimental "Persons and Places," in which Du Bois and Santayana narrate side by side, and in "Cold," which intersperses Bob Cole's final breakdown with Cole's own lyrics. At their best, the stories are suspenseful, thought provoking, mystical, and haunting. Keene's confident writing doesn't aim for easy description or evaluation; it approaches (and defies) literature on its own terms. (May)

Publishers Weekly

"Practically every sentence in the book perforates, stretches out, or pries open literary modes designed to be airtight, restrictive, and racially exclusionary…An expert generator of suspense, Keene also turns out to be a skilled humorist, a mischievous ironist, a deft, seductive storyteller and a studied historian."

Bookforum - Max Nelson

"Exquisite, and unlike anything I’ve ever read."

Eula Biss

"Only a few, John Keene among them, in our age, authentically test the physics of fiction as both provocation and mastery. Continuing what reads like the story collection as freedom project, in Counternarratives, Keene opens swaths of history for readers to more than imagine but to manifest and live in the passionate language of conjure and ritual."

Major Jackson

"In Counternarratives, John Keene undertakes a kind of literary counterarchaeology, a series of fictions that challenge our notion of what constitutes "real" or "accurate" history. His writing is at turns playful and erudite, lyric and coldly diagnostic, but always completely absorbing. Counternarratives could easily be compared to Borges or Bolaño, Calvino or Kiš, but at the same time it is a deeply American, resolutely contemporary book, that asks us to reconsider our own perspectives on the past—and the future."

Jess Row

"Genius – brilliant, polished and of considerable depth."

Ishmael Reed

"Of the scope of William T. Vollmann or Samuel R. Delany, but with a kaleidoscopic intuition all its own, Counternarratives is very easily one of the most vividly imagined and vitally timed books of the year. I haven't felt so refreshed in quite a while as a reader."

VICE

"Protean in style, erudite in reference, uncanny in effect, these stories and novellas inhabit, conjure, and invent characters written out of history by slavery, racism, and subordination."

Slate - Mark Sussman

"Keene finds inspiration in newspaper clippings, memoirs, and history, and anchors them in the eternal, universal, and mystical."

Vanity Fair

"We have become accustomed in recent years to the revisionary spirit of much postcolonial fiction, but the ambition, erudition and epic sweep of John Keene’s remarkable new collection of stories, travelling from the beginnings of modernity to modernism, place it in a class of its own. His book achieves no less than an imaginative repositioning of the history of the Americas ... Keene is that rarest of things today, a writer whose radicalism connects the politics of history to the politics of fiction."

Times Literary Supplement - Kate Webb

"Counternarratives proffers a series of stories in which religion and spirituality, art and language, violence and subjugation, homosexuality and eroticism, may shine through a panoply of voices."

Full Stop - Patrick Disselhorst

"Keene opens up the spaces between words and their objects, to create room where fresh meanings can play."

The Nation - Ben Ehrenreich

"Queering the script, defying the imperative to be silent, however, does not require confidence or a vision of what progress means. It is, rather, in all its uncertainty and risk, the most basic stuff of—the very matter of—life. It is also the crowning achievement of one of the year’s very best books."

The Quarterly Conversation - Brad Johnson

"Keene’s collection of short and longer historical fictions are formally varied, mold-breaking, and deeply political. He’s a radical artist working in the most conservative genres, and any search for innovation in this year’s U.S. fiction should start here."

Vulture - Christian Lorentzen

"Keene’s collection of 13 stories and novellas examines lives marked by the tectonic historical pressures of its five-century scope. Jumping from Reformation-era Brazil to Puritan New England to Langston Hughes’s Harlem, it is that rare book of short fiction with an epic intuition of time, accomplishing in a handful of inspired, intimate portraits what many sagas only manage in reams."

Epic Stories That Expand the Universal Family Plot - The New York Times - Julian Lucas

‘We have become accustomed in recent years to the revisionary spirit of much postcolonial fiction, but the ambition, erudition and epic sweep of John Keene’s remarkable new collection of stories, travelling from the beginnings of modernity to modernism, place it in a class of its own.’
— Kate Webb, TLS 

‘Counternarratives is that rare book of short fiction with an epic intuition of time, accomplishing in a handful of inspired, intimate portraits what many sagas only manage in reams.’
— Julian Lucas, New York Times

‘Keene’s collection of short and longer historical fictions are formally varied, mould-breaking, and deeply political. He’s a radical artist working in the most conservative genres, and any search for innovation in this year’s US fiction should start here.’
— Christian Lorentzen, Vulture 

‘Exquisite, and unlike anything I’ve ever read.’
— Eula Biss, author of On Immunity

‘Genius – brilliant, polished and of considerable depth.’
— Ishmael Reed, author of Mumbo Jumbo

‘Counternarratives is an extraordinary work of literature. John Keene is a dense, intricate, and magnificent writer.’
— Christine Smallwood, Harper’s

‘In Counternarratives, John Keene undertakes a kind of literary counterarchaeology, a series of fictions that challenge our notion of what constitutes “real” or “accurate” history. His writing is at turns playful and erudite, lyric and coldly diagnostic, but always completely absorbing. Counternarratives could easily be compared to Borges or Bolaño, Calvino or Kiš.’
— Jess Row, author of Your Face in Mine

‘Encompassing hundreds of fictional and historical characters over several centuries, and utilizing a mesmerizing array of styles – including slave narrative, historical document, stream of consciousness, fever dream, diary, field manual, concrete poetry – the book amasses a vision of epic capacity. In magic-like language, explores the experiences of rebel slaves and slave women, Langston Hughes and Huck Finn.’
— Blake Butler, VICE

From the Publisher

04/01/2015
Keene (Annotations) studied history and American literature at Harvard, and it shows. In clear, detailed language that recalls historical studies or newspaper stories, only stronger and brighter, he offers "counternarratives" focusing primarily on the Americas and the consequences of slavery. "An Outtake" considers the fate of a charismatic slave on the run during the Revolutionary era; "Rivers" details a freed Jim's encounter with the adult Huck and a nasty Tom Sawyer. VERDICT The occasional piece gets heavy-handed, but these are mostly concise, arresting stories that will attract smart readers.

Library Journal

2015-03-21
The stories in this collection use daring, sometimes-fragmented structures to examine bleak moments in American history—and help trace the effects of those moments to the present day. Keene divides his book into three sections, "Counternarratives," "Encounternarratives," and "Counternarrative"; the 13 stories range in length and style, from the brief and pastoral to the sprawling and collagelike, but they share two overarching concerns: a willingness to experiment with language and a tactile sense of history. The longest is "Gloss on a History of Roman Catholics in the Early American Republic, 1790-1825; Or The Strange History of Our Lady of the Sorrows"—several of the stories have titles that suggest academia—which begins in a fairly dry, historical vein. Over the course of the novella, however, the narrative becomes fractured, shifting from third person to first person and back and incorporating dialogue and found documents. It's dizzying at times, but the story's handling of religious life and the era's horrific racism becomes fuller as a result. "The Aeronauts," which begins in 1861, is more straightforwardly told but finds a similar tension between its protagonist's scientific pursuits and hot air ballooning and the societal strife that surrounds him. Over the course of the book, the stories slowly advance toward the present day, and Keene uses different techniques throughout. At one point, in "Cold," a character is told, "you have four or five different polyrhythms running concurrently, no man can play this." It reads like a metafictional nod to Keene's own experimental tendencies. These stories can be challenging, but at their best, they can be revelatory, and they sometimes end on haunting notes.

Kirkus Reviews