Guess and Check

by Thaddeus Rutkowski

Guess and Check is a Giron/Valdez Series for Unique Voices in Literature Book

“A stark, engrossing, Hemingway-esque portrait of a life spent in the margins.”—Kirkus Reviews

“ . . . tough and funny and touching and harrowing.” —John Barth

"... Guess and Check is spare, subtle and deadpan, Charles Simic married to Joyce Carol Oates. A beautifully constructed delicate narrative, a near dream of a book, a place ‘vulnerable to anyone who wants to break through the glass.’” —Terese Svoboda, author of Bohemian Girl

252 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 14, 2017

About the author

Thaddeus Rutkowski is the author of the novels Haywire, Tetched and Roughhouse. Haywire reached No. 1 on Small Press Distribution’s fiction best-seller list. All three books were finalists for an Asian American Literary Award. He teaches at Medgar Evers College and at the Writer’s Voice of the West Side YMCA in New York. His writing has appeared in The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry, The New York Times, The International Herald Tribune, Fiction and Fiction International. He received a 2012 fiction writing fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Reviews

[Rob Wolf · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a beautifully written book, full of insightful surprises.

[Esther Krivda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thaddeus Rutkowski’s novel ‘Guess and Check,’ is a novel of mystery though nobody is murdered in the story. A son, which is likely the writer himself, tells the story of growing up with a Caucasian father and an Asian mother and assorted other relatives. His father can be hilarious. His more outrageous statements called to my mind those of Ignatius J Reilly in O’Toole’s 'A Confederacy of Dunces'. But there are other things that the father says and does that are not at all funny and seemed downright menacing to this reader. And that’s where the comparison ends and the mystery begins – just who is this father? The son faithfully records his father’s every outrageous quip and his ‘is-he-or-isn’t he’ behavior but that’s all the son records. He doesn’t ask his father what he’s up to; he doesn’t explain even to himself how he feels about his father. Miraculously, the son grows up and seems successful… until his dreams - or are they nightmares - begin. As for the actual writing - every single word in every single sentence is spoken with the simplicity and directness of a child but could that be the child haunting the author even now?

[Carol Wierzbicki · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thad Rutkowski has made quite a franchise—one might even say genre—out of family dysfunction. I do not say this lightly or facetiously. In his previous autobiographical fiction Tetched (Behler Publications) and Roughhouse (Kaya Press), we meet a father with a persecution complex; a Chinese mother who’s mostly quiet and submissive but makes the occasional barbed retort; and a brother and sister who are just as isolated as Rutkowski’s protagonist, recognizing the symptoms but powerless to alleviate them....

Read the full review at https://northofoxford.wordpress.com/2....

[Sheila Myers · Rating 4 out of 5]

An insightful reflection of coming of age.