Unlucky Lucky Days

by Daniel Grandbois

Inventive, disconcerting, and hilarious, these seventy-three tales of our Unlucky Lucky Days might well be termed Dr. Seuss for adults. They call to mind Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories as readily as they do Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics, Rikki Ducornet's Butcher's Tales and Woody Allen's most literary writings. Braced on the shoulders of the fabulists, fantasists, absurdists, surrealists and satirists who came before him, Daniel Grandbois dredges up impossible meanings from the mineral and plant kingdoms, as well as the animal, and serves them to us as if they were nothing more fantastic than a plate of eggs and ham.

Daniel Grandbois’ other book, The Hermaphrodite (An Hallucinated Memoir), with forty original woodcuts by Argentine printmaker Alfredo Benavidez Bedoya, is forthcoming from Green Integer in fall 2008. Grandbois' writing has appeared in Conjunctions, Fiction, Boulevard, Sentence, Del Sol Review, and the anthologies Freak Lightning and Online Writing: The Best of the First Ten Years, among many others. Also a musician, Daniel plays or has played in three of the pioneering bands of “The Denver Sound:” Slim Cessna's Auto Club, Tarantella, and Munly.

ABA Indie Next Book (2000)

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories, Poetry

128 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2008

About the author

Daniel Grandbois is the author of several books, including Unlucky Lucky Days (an Indie Next Notable Book & Believer Book Award Reader Survey Selection) and A Revised Poetry of Western Philosophy. His work has appeared in Fiction, Boulevard, and Conjunctions, among others.

"These are funny, bizarre, moving stories--a pleasure to read." --LYDIA DAVIS

"These are works of surpassing literary merit... some of the most inventive, restless and creative fiction I have read in the last five years. [They] sustain contemporary American fiction, even rehabilitate it, and to have all these works in one place for readers of the future is to do a good thing for all who care about the condition of prose writing in North America." --RICK MOODY

"Reading [Unlucky Lucky Tales], I think of the great jazz improvisers or Angela Hewitt's version of Bach's "Goldberg Variations." Here is a plenitude, a world of effects and inventions, from a fine and mentally agile writer... This is a book of imagination's plenty. Ultimately, it is a book of wonder and delight. --ED OCHESTER

"Perhaps Daniel Grandbois is the love child of Rod Serling, HP Lovecraft, and Russell Edson. His prose poems hybridize shards of folk tale, sci fi, wacky animism, derailed creation myths, and surreal apocalypse... Kiss conventional reality goodbye and prepare to have your brain rearranged, to enter a realm in which scintillating, nonstop invention is god." --AMY GERSTLER

“Imagine, as Daniel Grandbois has, a conflation of Marxes (Karl and Groucho) and a hipster Plato, and you can begin to understand the enterprise of reimagining the history of Western philosophy as a series of comic summaries, complete with abstracts for the novice and infused with a storyteller’s sense of the need to entertain, while shedding light on the great intellectual enterprises from ancient to modern times. This book is a marvel.” —CHRISTOPHER KENNEDY

"Animated by a wonderfully droll and fantastical imagination, these little stories are delicious." --RIKKI DUCORNET

"One is tempted to look for precedents to his odd surrealism and verbal pranks, but it's clear Grandbois has staked out his own territory, one peopled with offbeat characters and varied discourses... The wise fool, an old conceit of literature, resurfaces, and he is of course Grandbois himself." --PETER JOHNSON

"Grandbois is a master of the double-edged word, of stories that both cut through the world like butter and double-back to saw themselves to bits." --BRIAN EVENSON

"Singularly original and captivating... an important work of fiction that should transform what notions of fiction may currently exist." --LUIS J. RODRIGUEZ

"[A] modern space-time set of interconnected myths and stories... startling sets of shape shiftings and melting tableaus... elegantly precise... graceful... a work of art." --ED SANDERS

"A report from another world... [W]e are reminded of why we read fiction in the first place: to gain access to the wonderful peculiarities of the author's mind." --JEFF VANDERMEER (Amazon Daily Blog)

"A celebration of language in its purest form, exactly what poetry itself was supposed to be." --BEST EXPERIMENTAL BOOK Listing 2008, CCLaP (Chicago Center for Literature & Photography)

"In a folklore-like fugue that resembles a darkly humorous Jorge Luis Borges or Italo Calvino, Grandbois... use[s] everything from animals to sentient pieces of paper to illustrate metaphysically dizzying truths about the world." --THE ONION

Reviews

[karen · Rating 3 out of 5]

i bought this book because i didnt want to have to return it to the publisher, but i needed the shelf space at work. i do that a lot, and now i need someone to come over here and make shelf space on my own shelves... i liked many of these stories enough to give the book a four star rating, but i know i am not the target audience, because im only feeling a three. these are surreal flash-fiction pieces, and even though they are super-short, their language made me have to read them a few times to "get" them, the way i have to do with poetry (or my cataloging book today, which put me to sleep three times.) but these werent sleepy, just poetic.

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

“You must tell the truth,” said the tapeworm, measuring the reviewer’s guts.
“But what is the truth?” squeaked the louse, perched on his ear.
“And where shall we find it?” said the stone in his heart.
But their voices were lost in a dense web of words, trapped for an instant on a flickering screen, before they were devoured by a ravenous click.
“There, you see?” said the tapeworm, as he floated disembodied.
“Is that why we must speak the truth?” asked the louse.
“Is this where we shall find it?” asked the heart stone, knowing full well that the only answer would be the next question, which was already hard at work, drawing the arc of a smile under the reviewer’s nose.
“Is this why we feel alone?” mumbled the smile. “Is this why we write?”
But its words were devoured by a ravenous click.

PS: We kindly request that you refrain from running in the Grandbois Gallery. Patrons are, however, encouraged to take one of the works home with them. But be warned: Counterfeiters will prosecuted to the full extent of the law!

[Jason · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't pretend to understand each of these little stories, but those that I do I really enjoyed. I hope my mild confusion was merely a result of an inadvertent line-skip while reading on the light rail, rather than some defect on the author's part. Perhaps these tales are really seeds, and some day soon their meaning will spring forth from my head, fully clad in armor.

This is a brave collection: Bold strokes on a tiny canvas (for most stories fill less than a page, and a few are shorter than this review). Some are quite funny, and some simply are.

But then this seems a collection to be read over and again – gleaning new meaning with each passing glance. And evoked – for me – the poems and drawings of Shel Silverstein.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

UNLUCKY LUCKY DAYS, a debut assortment, is fabulist flash-fic of the highest order. Nothing in the book runs so long as three full pages, & in general the work eludes the social & economic demarcations of what we like call "realism." Instead it offers disturbing yet charming shards of unbridled imagination. In a typical metamorphosis, a brass lion’s-head knocker takes leave of its doorway, setting off to play middle-school pranks. All told, the collection divvies 73 surreal miniatures among seven sections labeled, as if Grandbois were a good Judeo-Christian, "Sunday" through "Saturday." Yet the sensibility comes across as pagan; spirits reanimate the world’s common clay. He can be gloomy, suggesting for instance the nightmare morning of 9/11, or he can be healing, turning the Inferno into a Tunnel of Love. Indeed, inspired reversals at the last minute distinguish nearly all these abrupt dream-loops, now childlike, now chilling. These DAYS can create a climactic rush via a well-worked lack of commas & they can arrive at ironies that supply rightness and closure. At their best, they push cross-cutting valences to peak intensity, then leave us gasping. Now, on occasion, there emerges a world we recognize. “Hat and Rack” might have to do with sexual secrecy (the final word is “closet”), and “The Sea Squirt” might make an environmental argument. But even when the stories lack such grounding, the writer negotiates the shoals of cuteness -- the obvious danger here -- masterfully. He may work with signifying wads of gum or, repeatedly, with articulate spiders, yet he nearly always strikes a balance between the ticklish and the haunting. Those wads of gum mutate into the Weird Sisters of Macbeth (indeed, this text is rife with others, everyone from Borges to Bob Dylan) & in the end they achieve the timelessness of geometry.

[Jason Pettus · Rating 4 out of 5]

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.)

Regular readers know that I'm a big fan of experimental work, but that I always face a professional problem when trying to write reviews of such work here; namely, my reviews tend to be long and detailed analyses of the story being told, something almost impossible to do when the book in question is experimental or a collection of poetry or whatnot. And that's why my write-up today of Daniel Grandbois' new Unlucky Lucky Days is going to be so short and muddled; because I liked it, don't get me wrong, I liked it quite a bit in fact, but liked it for the same reasons I will sometimes like a certain book of poetry, which is something I in particular just find difficult to express in an analytical critique. In fact, it helps to think of the 73 chapters of Grandbois' book not as stand-alone narrative stories but rather highly abstract prose-poems; anyone expecting to be able to "follow along" with the book's events is just going to walk away disappointed, while those who wallow in the complex wordplay and striking mental images are bound to like it a lot more. It's a frustrating kind of book to recommend, because I have no good reasons I can point to as far as why you should check it out yourself, other than "ooh, it's weird and cool and I dug it;" nonetheless, I am recommending it today, but only for those who also like such authors as TS Eliot, Mark Danielewski, and Karen Finley.

Out of 10: 7.9, or 9.4 for lovers of experimental literature/poetry

[Ben · Rating 5 out of 5]

Chock full of animals, vegetables and minerals, its oddly, yet wholly, engrossing and like nothing else you've read before.

[Meg Sherman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Um... WOW. Something tells me that this author LOVES mushrooms... and I'm not talking about the saran-wrapped, grocery store variety, either. HAHAHA Honestly, I LOVED this book. It's the most intelligent, unique thing I've read in a long time. But yes... it's pretty much an acid trip in words.

Grandbois has been compared to Dr. Seuss, but I don't think that's quite right. They share creativity, to be certain, but Seuss is much more structured and "sensical." Reading this book was more like analyzing a Salvador Dali painting of indoor clouds or melting clocks. It is pure surrealism in the written form--which I didn't think was even POSSIBLE, so I gotta give some serious kudos.

So will YOU like it? I've come up with a three question quiz to help you determine if you will:

#1 Do you use the word "weird" as a compliment? (personally, I inherently LOVE things that are weird, so it's about the nicest adjective I know).

#2 When you wake up from a truly Alice-in-Wonderland-type dream, do you wish it was ACTUALLY REAL just because of its super-freaky awesomeness?

#3 Women--have you ever worn fairy wings in public, not as part of a Halloween costume? (Or men--have you ever wondered what it was like to be a stapler?)

If you've answered yes to at least two of these questions, CHECK THIS BOOK OUT. I really can't explain what it's like in words, so I'll include a complete chapter for you to analyze at your own discretion. Here it is:

"THE NEWSPAPER

"Having been read only once, the usual story, the small-town newspaper was stuffed into a cereal box, slated for the can. It tried to strike up a conversation, but the box couldn't read, no matter the words splattered all over it.

"Ah, but, miracle of miracles, the paper was retrieved. It shouted for joy, something it very rarely did, which sounded like this:!. But then the newspaper was separated into three pages and folded and creased in unnatural places.

"It became a hat, an airplane, and a sailboat.

"'Look at me,' said the hat, perched high on the bald man's head, greedily soaking up the sweat.

"'What about meeeeeeeeeeee?' asked the airplane, soaring through the dining room. It had borrowed several e's from different places to ask such a question, as no respectable paper was going to print more than two in a row. With an anticlimactic crinkle, the airplane crashed to the floor.

"For no apparent reason, the plane and hat were gathered and lit on fire.

"Carrying the news, the boat set sail down a gutter but took on too much water and was soon despondent in the sewer, where the rats, to its horror, could read."

[Chriss · Rating 3 out of 5]

Daniel has a keen sense of the bizarre, often overlooked aspects of life. His stories of stains and hairs are told from a perspective few, if any have the pleasure of seeking and the uniqueness factor is high! Not all will understand his art but anyone who is needing a trip down an unconventional road, try Unlucky Lucky Days.

[Vince Darcangelo · Rating 2 out of 5]

This review originally appeared in the ROCKY MOUNTAIN NEWS
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/news...

Grandbois has ear for music - and words
By Vince Darcangelo, Special to the Rocky

Audiophiles may recognize Daniel Grandbois as the bassist of some of Denver's most interesting bands, such as Tarantella and Slim Cessna's Auto Club, groups that run the gamut from gypsy to gospel to Gothic Americana. It's no surprise, then, that when he trades his four-string for a pad and paper, Grandbois takes a musical approach to fiction - with an equally sharp grasp of the absurd.

The result is a melodic brand of flash fiction - two- to three-paragraph stories that could be called prose poems - that blends the rhythm and meter of music with the narrative thrust of fiction. The quirkiness of his music carries onto the page as well, for in Grandbois' surreal world a chair or a termite is as likely a protagonist as a person.

Grandbois' stories have been collected in a new book, Unlucky Lucky Days (BOA Editions), which came out in June and has been designated a "notable" book by the American Booksellers Association. His next book, a novella, The Hermaphrodite: An Hallucinated Memoir, is due out in September.

In advance of his book-signing next week, Grandbois sat down with the Rocky to talk about - what else? - words and music.

How has your musical background informed your writing?

I approach writing through my ear. Stories are often begun because of the sound of a certain group of words, and revisions can consist solely of making lines sound better, which doesn't always mean more beautiful. The human organism responds inexplicably to music, to particular combinations of sonic frequencies held for varying durations and punctuated by silences; I believe it responds in similarly meaningful yet ultimately incomprehensible ways to the absurd, twisted language of these little stories, which are sometimes hard to "get" intellectually but nevertheless find their marks.

Do you find a relationship between the music business and the fiction business?

Other than that they've both been taken over by a corporate mindset that cares less about art than it does the bottom line? Fortunately, this shift has happened at the same time that it's become easier for independent companies to produce and distribute great products, so they have risen to fill the void.

Why have you chosen to work in short fiction? What do you feel you can accomplish with flash fiction as opposed to longer fiction?

It's the way I write, the way my mind works. I'm just glad there's an audience for it at the moment. I guess I could say, too, that by writing in the prose poem or flash fiction forms . . . I am able to bring my mind's natural penchant for the absurd, the whimsical, the poetic and the imagistic together with what I've learned through the years about more narrative-driven forms.

I think your stories would lend themselves well to illustration. Have you considered having an artist illustrate some of your stories for publication in graphic form?

My agent has been working on foreign rights for Unlucky Lucky Days, and one of the interested publishers in the Spanish language would want to add illustrations if he takes it on. The Hermaphrodite: An Hallucinated Memoir, the book that's forthcoming from Green Integer - well, part of the process of making that one more publishable was to add art to it and make it a kind of graphic novel, but one that leaned more toward the words than the images . . .

I was thrilled to learn that Argentine artist Alfredo Benavidez Bedoya, whose work is collected in major museums all over the world, was interested in doing 40 woodcuts for the book. This series of woodcuts has already been shown in galleries in Buenos Aires and is scheduled to show in Denver at Redshift Gallery on Oct. 2 to go along with the September release of the book.

Do you read a lot of poetry, and what, for you, is the relationship between flash fiction and poetry?

I read a lot of poetry when I was working toward my MFA in poetry from Bennington College, which I still need to go back and finish, but I hadn't really before then and I haven't really since. I did, however, listen to a lot of poetry, thousands of hours, perhaps, of poetry books on tape - again with the ear - almost everywhere I went in the car for five years or so in my early 20s.

As for the relationship between poetry and flash fiction, I remember reading that (Raymond) Carver . . . said he liked working in the short story form because it was closer to poetry in how condensed it was, how much every word had to count. Flash fiction, then, is that much closer still to poetry. It can even lose some of the narrative qualities of fiction altogether and veer off into the imagistic, symbolic, language-driven lands of poetry. At which point, many would call it prose poetry. The distinctions remain, thankfully, unclear.

What are a few of the stories from Unlucky Lucky Days that stand out the most for you?

The Father because of its imagery and because it was the main story that Denver-based photographer Gary Isaacs and I were thinking about when it struck him which photo from his archive would be perfect for the cover. He showed it to me, and it was one of those moments. I welled up with tears, and he left the room so I could be alone with that.

Then, I'd say The Author for its autobiographical content, for capturing my process and the way my mind works. . . . Then there's Happy Birthday Grandma (a creation myth in which a plastic giraffe learns firsthand about the circle of life and death) because of the humor and the language and the memory of staring so closely at my daughter's plastic giraffe in this ant-filled basement room on this tiny, roadless island in the Atlantic.


Unlucky Lucky Days:

A collection of 73 works of flash fiction, Unlucky Lucky Days reads like a group of parables or, at its finer moments, Zen koans. The stories typically feature inanimate objects or anthropomorphized animals as protagonists, be it an upturned chair, trying not to draw attention to itself, or a termite in the throes of an existential crisis.

While the deeper meaning of each piece - if there is one - is often indiscernible, at its best, Unlucky Lucky Days is like a peyote trip in the desert - things seem familiar, but different. If you really immerse yourself in these stories, you might find yourself questioning whether Grandbois' cracked perception just might be right."

All in the family

If the Grandbois name sounds familiar, that's because there are two authors in the Grandbois family. Daniel's brother, Peter, is the author of the well-received novel The Gravedigger (Chronicle Books, 2006).

[M · Rating 5 out of 5]

" Unlucky Lucky Days" is a book of 73 succulent stories. Every word resonates with an allegorical style that opens the doors to an unusual universe of objects and characters-- "The Chair," "The Fish," "The Log," "The Yarn," "New Heaven," "The Urge," "The Left Hand.” These stories are astonishing, surreal, satirical, philosophical, written with great humor.

A third of the stories center on humans, but you will meet many other strange creatures here as well, like The Three Cranes--Fly No Oval, Hear No Oval, and Walk No Oval--and the beautiful but doomed giraffe, curiously named Happy Birthday Grandma.

From "The Hair:” “When the wind was just right, the hair made throatlike tunnels of itself and imitated birdscalls. ‘WHIP-poor-WILL... WHIP-poor-WILL,’ chirped the hair at twilight, sometimes four hundred times without stopping.”

“Unlucky Lucky Days” is an absolute treasure! One of my favorite tales is "Greener Pastures," in which a giant man-eating frog, who dreams of becoming an architect, shapes his dung heaps into replicas of the churches he has devoured so that when he leaves “once more for greener pastures, the people [are:] stuck there, praying for their own.”

[Holly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cool-in-a-weird-way, very odd, and extremely short stories exploring what kinds of lives and thoughts animals, inanimate objects, minerals, and plants (to mention a few) would have if they could. I didn't read all, but picked and chose those that interested me. A refreshing, imaginative, and unexpected read.

[Rhonda · Rating 1 out of 5]

A little too strange for me. A collection of VERY short stories, everyday subjects, that do off-the-wall things, like "sound" that builds a nest in an ear, "urges" that do things, and "mirrors" that wish they could see themselves, etc. At least I didn't waste a lot of time reading it, it only takes a short while.

[Jennifer · Rating 3 out of 5]

***3.5***

Another book I wish they had half stars for. Some of the stories were hilarious and I read them out loud to my husband. Some were just strange. So while I didn't love the book I did enjoy quite a few of the short stories. He has a unique, creative spin to his writing. "The Left Hand" was one of my favorites!

[Erin]

I really wanted to like this book, but I couldn't get into it. I kept trying and putting it aside and then it was due back at the library and I had to return. I will try again when my life isn't as busy and my brain can focus. I want to like it :)

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed reading this one; it's off-the-wall, a little bizarre, and even though out of about 70 stories, I fully understood 5, caught most of about 10, and the rest I'm still trying to figure out. Believe it or not, this book won awards, so someone fully understood it.

[Colleen Coyne · Rating 1 out of 5]

There were a handful of stories here that I enjoyed, but it wasn't coming together for me. Its oddness wasn't particularly endearing, engaging, challenging, or odd enough to be really interesting. It's too bad, because I really wanted to like this book.

[Joni · Rating 1 out of 5]

I was so hoping for another book like "I thought there would be cake." I really wanted to enjoy a bunch of short stories. However the stories were way too short, and read like jokes. They each needed a little more depth.

[Jackie]

I really did try, but this just isn't my cup of tea, though I do enjoy how visual his writing is.

[Jill Roblyer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Danny (Daniel) Grandbois is a friend from high school and an amazing talent. I highly recommend this book. You will laugh and wonder how Daniel comes up with these stories!

[Doug Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Best Book of the Year, for sure!!!

[Colette]

Weird. Not even humorous, though I didn't read all the stories. I guess it just wasn't for me. Kinda gruesome, too.

[Matt Phillips · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting collection with the idea of creation stories at its core. Whimsical and touching.

[Kookie · Rating 1 out of 5]

Terrible, pointless, irrritating. I would give him money if he promised to stop writing.