José de Piérola - Flowers that grow from light bulbs. Bullets stopped by an iPod. A ship and woman taken apart piece by piece. Encompassing thousands of years, this collection is at once intimate and panoramic. Each story aspires to be an imaginative periscope to see part of our shared human experience from a new angle

José de Piérola, Fabulations, Kernpunkt Press, 2018.



http://josedepierola.com/website/index.html


Encompassing thousands of years, Fabulations is composed of minimalist short stories that straddle history and fiction, fact and imagination to tell stories as varied as the early effects of human civilization on our planet or the strange relationship between machines, chess and the human mind. These fabulations, intimate and panoramic, are imaginative periscopes that reveal part of our shared human experience from fresh, new angles.


Flowers that grow from light bulbs. Bullets stopped by an iPod. A ship and woman taken apart piece by piece. FABULATIONS is a collection of minimalist short stories that straddle history and fiction, fact and imagination. Encompassing thousands of years, this collection is at once intimate and panoramic. Each story aspires to be an imaginative periscope to see part of our shared human experience from a new angle.


"De Piérola welcomes his readers into fabulous worlds, from distant places and times to familiar neighborhoods, from strange loops of reality to the stone and dust of our own cities. Each story is rooted in human desire, in real people, and there is an urgency in reading them, a reluctance to put the book down, as you might miss something. And you don’t want to miss anything de Piérola writes.  The spirit of Cortázar, Robert Louis Stevenson, Borges, Poe, welcome you into these fabulous places of the imagination.The stories are beautiful and heartbreaking." - Daniel Chacón

"Fabulations is marvelous and startling: utterly original, gravely essential. Elegantly traversing chronology, geography and narrative structures, what is historically absurd with the protest of imagination, it provokes and disturbs, pierces and resonates, sings through Calvino’s credo that literature is “the search for lightness . . . to the weight of living,” handling terror, irony and humor all at once in the same palm, and so nimbly, that at times all we can be sure of is the measure of time. José de Piérola is a writer of extraordinary power. These stories are deftly rendered with such sensitivity that he arrives, through the fabulist narrative, at a masterful calculus of who through history we have been—and in so doing, ennobles who we can be, and who we are." - Sasha Pimentel

José de Piérola (Lima, Peru) is a fiction writer translator and literary critic. He worked for more than ten years as a computer consultant before he left his career to complete a Ph.D. in Literature at the University of California, San Diego in 2007. His novels El camino de regreso and Un beso del infierno chronicle the civil struggle in Peru during the 1980s. He has also published the novels Summa Caligramática and Shatranj: el juego de los reyes, and the short story collections Sur y Norte and Máquina del tiempo. He has translated The Art of Fiction by Henry James and L’Etranger by Albert Camus to Spanish, and Quechua Magic-Religious Tales from Lucanamarca by José María Arguedas to English. Fabulations is his first work in English. He teaches fiction writing at the University of Texas, El Paso.