If You Can

by J.I. Daniels

JI Daniels deftly creates characters of the real and the irreal. In dazzlingly innovative fiction, If You Can captures unexpected empathy in offbeat experiences and surreal bodies. Imaginatively stirring yet illuminating, every heartbreak and every fantastical wonder seems an adaptive defense to surviving the trauma of being human.
-- Aimee Parkison, Refrigerated Music for a Gleaming Woman

Magical, comic, harrowing, and tender, the inventive fictions of If You Can transport the reader to worlds where children dissolve, become sand or flame, water, ashes—where the exhilarating trauma of being struck by lightning converges with the endless sorrow of living as an addict. Here, if you can bear it, a cold becomes severe pneumonia and progresses to sepsis before opening your compromised bowels to emaciating C. diff. By some miracle, you survive all this only to discover you have cancer, that the afflictions a body, a soul, a relationship can endure are almost, but not quite, infinite. JI Daniels illuminates internal despair and external wonder: with uncanny insight and intuitive grace, he unveils the secrets of snow, its myriad forms, its numinous capacity to expose suffering and love—the recklessly joyful desperation in the hearts of two orphaned sisters. Always he balances grief with humor, loss with resilience, shame with mercy.
-- Melanie Rae Thon, The Voice of the River

Quirky and deft, these stories pick apart the real you thought you knew to offer the stranger worlds lurking within. An impressive debut, in which the fantastic always manages to get at something more human and the humor has a serious, and sometimes cutting, edge to it.
-- Brian Evenson, Song for the Unraveling of the World

Tender, deft, conversational, gently comic yet ever ominous, the fictions that make up If You Can assume a certain amount of unhinged reality and ontological uncertainty as their inhabitants attempt to work within the confines of these awkward spacesuits, these slushy, relentless impossibilities, called our bodies.
-- Lance Olsen, author of My Red Heaven

186 pages, Paperback

Published November 10, 2020

Reviews

[Maddy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can usually get the hang of a collection's style by the time I get halfway through it, but this one has a strange shapeshifting quality I really haven't seen before. Everything feels new compared to the thing before it (but also, it all goes together?). These stories remind me of Kelly Link's stuff ("Clearing" reminds me so much of "Origin Story"), though this is less fantasy and more actual science with a particular focus on the body. I also want to compare it to George Saunders' stuff, too -- there is an attention to the depths of relationships between people, and some stories have this minimalist quality -- but the humor is much less of the silly, light, almost throwaway kind I associate with Saunders. It is much sharper, much smarter, much more meaningful.

"Body, Etc." and "Startled Poet Who is a Bat" were my favorites. I was also fond of "Goat Sucker." The former is brilliant all the way through, and the dialogue form with the changing names was particularly compelling. "Startled Poet Who is a Bat" has a one-paragraph turn that is as concise as it is gutting, and there is a foreboding via play with time that I really liked. All of this is very sharp, though, and often contains a lot of depth in its observations.

[Joe Sacksteder · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the best short story collection I've read in a while! I particularly loved "The Boxes," "Body, Etc.", and "Mitosis."