Nominal Cases

by Thomas Cotsonas

Fiction. "Like his literary antecedents—John Barth and Jorge Luis Borges both haunt these pages—Thomas Cotsonas takes (and offers) great pleasure in the revelation that the central (though often occult) subject of fiction is always inevitably fictiveness itself. But clever and self-aware as these fictions are, they are also fully alive to the cathartic power of narrative, and the potential for a well-drawn character to show us something human, true, and surprising. NOMINAL CASES thrills both mind and heart—a rare delight."—Joel Brouwer

174 pages, Paperback

Published March 1, 2016

Reviews

[John Vanderslice · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an exceptionally interesting book of short stories, one that really marks Thomas Costonas as a writer to watch. It's experimental in nature, but not so much so as to be off-putting. Many of the pieces purposefully stretch the notion of a story can do and look like, and come close to absorbing other genres, like biography, autobiography, lyrical recollection, even the questionnaire. But in that quality lies their interest. New Yorkers will appreciate a long collage story (or what Costonas calls a "slideshow") about Robert Moses, the man who so determined, almost singlehandedly, the physical structure of New York and its freeways. The story mixes photographs with quotations about Moses and short prose passages highlighting Moses at different points in his career as an NYC and New York state civil servant. It's an effective way to suggest the many different sides of an exceedingly complex man. My only regret is that Costonas does not include many of the photographs that he describes in the prose passages. Other of the stories are metafictional, with a playfulness that it is enlivening and engrossing. Those stories work really well; most surprising, but welcome, was the story "Quartet (4)" in which the author muses on his attempts to successfully to write about writing and follow the example of greats like Borges, Wolff, Beckett, Barth, Calvino, and Coover. So, in a sense it's a metafiction about metafiction, but it reads simply like a personal and perfectly honest statement about the challenges of the form, and about writing in general. This is a writer's book, but definitely a reader's book too.