Questionstruck: A Collection of Question-Based Texts Derived from the Books of Calvin Trillin

by William Walsh

Questionstruck traces the line of questioning throughout Calvin Trillin's first twenty-five books, compiling all of Trillin's interrogatives--the rhetorical, the political, and the victual--into one dizzying collection. Echoing Trillin's food and travel books, his reports in The New Yorker , and his political verse in The Nation , Questionstruck is an inventive and experimental text that begs to be defined. "Master re-contextualizer William Walsh has pulled off an unlikely he didn't write a word of this book, and yet its twisted pleasures couldn't possibly belong to anyone else. He has managed to transform the collected works of Calvin Trillin into some kind of whacked-out koan, a strangely compelling harangue that will leave you dumbstruck." --J. Robert Lennon, author of Mailman , and The Funnies

174 pages, Paperback

First published March 10, 2009

About the author

William Walsh is the author of The Poems and The Poets (both from Erratum Press), Forty-five American Boys (Outpost19), ON TV, Unknown Arts, Ampersand, Mass., Pathologies, Questionstruck, Stephen King Stephen King (all from Keyhole Press), and Without Wax: A Documentary Novel (Casperian Books).

His work has appeared in Annalemma, Artifice, Quick Fiction,, New York Tyrant, Caketrain, Juked, LIT, Rosebud, Quarterly West, Crescent Review, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, as well as anthologies like The &NOW Anthology: Best of Innovative Writing, Dzanc's Best of the Web, and New Micro: Norton Anthology of Exceptionally Short Fiction.

Reviews

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book makes cognitive dissonance harmonious.

[Ben]

Questionstruck is not just a loving, crazy, fragmented tribute to the work of the great Calvin Trillin, but a celebration of all things political, familial, edible, and textual, both dense and wonderful, and bordering on poetry.

[Kathy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating and discombobulating experimental novel. I've never read a "derived" or "recontextualized" work before, but this held my interest with the sheer relentlessness of the voice.