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Flowing in the Gossamer Fold
“Ben Spivey’s alluringly melodial debut novel of a marriage gone asunder unreels itself with the indisputable logic of dreams and delivers, along its phantasmagoric and dazing way, emotional clarities that feel entirely new.”
-–Gary Lutz, author of Stories in the Worst Way
“In mental maps made of out of milk and hair, Ben Spivey negotiates the slick space between our dirt and air. ‘You can’t count on things to stay how you expect,’ a man’s lover tells him just after handing him a bag of her pubic hair and turning into a kind of bird. It is warning meant for him and anybody expecting any less than magic in the lean, prismatic, calming barrage of Spivey’s sentences and rooms and hours, built on the all too rare commodity of heart.”
--Blake Butler, author of Scorch Atlas and There Is No Year
“Reading like the troubled offspring of Claire Denis’s L’Intrus and the surreal ending of Jim Thompson’s Savage Night, Spivey’s Flowing in the Gossamer Fold creates a deliberate and satisfying confusion between the habitations of the skull, of the word, and of the world. A strange and satisfying debut.”
--Brian Evenson, author of Last Days and Fugue State
“Malcolm Blackburn (motivational speaker, estranged husband of a bird with orange pubic hair, and lover to a mannequin) has a voice that throttled me from the first page, while Ben Spivey–an extraordinarily talented and shockingly young new writer–demonstrates that his own voice is versatile, vivid, funny, and trenchant. I read the book in one eager sitting. Flowing in the Gossamer Fold is a bizarre and genuinely exciting debut.”
--Nick Antosca, author of Midnight Picnic and Fires
“Part Jungian allegory, part surreal dreamscape, part Odyssean tramp, Ben Spivey’s Flowing in the Gossamer Fold is a romp through distorted time in a landscape carved by sudden oceans built from perpetual rain, where a cityscape has sidewalks littered with disappearing sages, and an edenic forest is graffitied with the father’s word. The sentences of Malcolm Blackburn’s midlife crisis are charged with the energy of a young man—the young man who penned this fucked up vision of pain and forgiveness, of what is ultimately the lesson of it’s beautiful, and it sucks.”
--Jamie Iredell, author of Prose. Poems. a Novel., and The Book of Freaks
-–Gary Lutz, author of Stories in the Worst Way
“In mental maps made of out of milk and hair, Ben Spivey negotiates the slick space between our dirt and air. ‘You can’t count on things to stay how you expect,’ a man’s lover tells him just after handing him a bag of her pubic hair and turning into a kind of bird. It is warning meant for him and anybody expecting any less than magic in the lean, prismatic, calming barrage of Spivey’s sentences and rooms and hours, built on the all too rare commodity of heart.”
--Blake Butler, author of Scorch Atlas and There Is No Year
“Reading like the troubled offspring of Claire Denis’s L’Intrus and the surreal ending of Jim Thompson’s Savage Night, Spivey’s Flowing in the Gossamer Fold creates a deliberate and satisfying confusion between the habitations of the skull, of the word, and of the world. A strange and satisfying debut.”
--Brian Evenson, author of Last Days and Fugue State
“Malcolm Blackburn (motivational speaker, estranged husband of a bird with orange pubic hair, and lover to a mannequin) has a voice that throttled me from the first page, while Ben Spivey–an extraordinarily talented and shockingly young new writer–demonstrates that his own voice is versatile, vivid, funny, and trenchant. I read the book in one eager sitting. Flowing in the Gossamer Fold is a bizarre and genuinely exciting debut.”
--Nick Antosca, author of Midnight Picnic and Fires
“Part Jungian allegory, part surreal dreamscape, part Odyssean tramp, Ben Spivey’s Flowing in the Gossamer Fold is a romp through distorted time in a landscape carved by sudden oceans built from perpetual rain, where a cityscape has sidewalks littered with disappearing sages, and an edenic forest is graffitied with the father’s word. The sentences of Malcolm Blackburn’s midlife crisis are charged with the energy of a young man—the young man who penned this fucked up vision of pain and forgiveness, of what is ultimately the lesson of it’s beautiful, and it sucks.”
--Jamie Iredell, author of Prose. Poems. a Novel., and The Book of Freaks
Paperback
First published August 1, 2010
45 people want to read
About the author
Ben Spivey
3 books15 followersBen Spivey is the author of Black God (2012) & Flowing in the Gossamer Fold (2010).
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
October 5, 2021
This book is a ridiculously good read. I’m not gonna critique it, or compare it, just highly recommend it. There are sentences from it still swimming around in my head.
December 30, 2015
From author
3.5 Stars - Strongly Recommended to readers familiar with genre
Pgs: 164
Meet Malcolm. He is a motivational speaker who is about to lose his motivation, and eventually his mind, after his wife asks him to leave.
Malcolm's life is told in a string of events that are not necessarily laid out in order. Sometimes they follow each other sequentially, other times the chapters run parallel to the main plot. Each chapter varies in length - some are only a few paragraphs, while others span 10 pages.
The real events of Malcolm's life are sometimes difficult to distinguish from events that might be taking place in his head. Post divorce announcement, a girl who heard one of Malcolm's presentations blows him in the front seat of his car. His wife leaves him a small plastic bag with her pubic hair in it as a parting gift. These things, I believe. But when he describes how part of his wife splits off and becomes a sparrow that follows him around whispering logical and cruel things to him - like "You can't leave, where will you go?" - and talks about the mannequin that is always there in his peripheral vision, I begin to question poor Malcolm's mental stability.
When Malcolm moves out of his marital home and into a strange cabin with countless holes in the walls and floors, he - and his story - seem to lose their grasp on reality. And here is where the reading can either become interesting... or frustrating.
Author Ben Spivey experiments with language, sentence structure, and clarity in a way that challenges his readers to focus, pay attention, and decide for themselves which events are truly taking place and which ones are taking place only in Malcolm's mind.
In Flowing in the Gossamer Fold, the inside of our protagonist's head is like a wall in a house. Everything looks great until you start peeling away the wallpaper, and discovering the tiny cracks and nicks it had been covering up. Once exposed to the air, those cracks and nicks begin to deepen and widen and the dry wall suddenly starts to crumble and fall to the floor.. slowly at first, then gradually in larger and larger chunks, which causes the ceiling above it to begin to sag and leak, and quickly put the integrity of the home into question.
Spivey's novels is very much unlike anything you have ever read before and will read in the future, though fans of Blake Butler would appreciate this novel as the writing techniques are somewhat similar.
Thanks to Ben, and his publishing company Blue Square Press, for making this review copy available.
3.5 Stars - Strongly Recommended to readers familiar with genre
Pgs: 164
Meet Malcolm. He is a motivational speaker who is about to lose his motivation, and eventually his mind, after his wife asks him to leave.
Malcolm's life is told in a string of events that are not necessarily laid out in order. Sometimes they follow each other sequentially, other times the chapters run parallel to the main plot. Each chapter varies in length - some are only a few paragraphs, while others span 10 pages.
The real events of Malcolm's life are sometimes difficult to distinguish from events that might be taking place in his head. Post divorce announcement, a girl who heard one of Malcolm's presentations blows him in the front seat of his car. His wife leaves him a small plastic bag with her pubic hair in it as a parting gift. These things, I believe. But when he describes how part of his wife splits off and becomes a sparrow that follows him around whispering logical and cruel things to him - like "You can't leave, where will you go?" - and talks about the mannequin that is always there in his peripheral vision, I begin to question poor Malcolm's mental stability.
When Malcolm moves out of his marital home and into a strange cabin with countless holes in the walls and floors, he - and his story - seem to lose their grasp on reality. And here is where the reading can either become interesting... or frustrating.
Author Ben Spivey experiments with language, sentence structure, and clarity in a way that challenges his readers to focus, pay attention, and decide for themselves which events are truly taking place and which ones are taking place only in Malcolm's mind.
In Flowing in the Gossamer Fold, the inside of our protagonist's head is like a wall in a house. Everything looks great until you start peeling away the wallpaper, and discovering the tiny cracks and nicks it had been covering up. Once exposed to the air, those cracks and nicks begin to deepen and widen and the dry wall suddenly starts to crumble and fall to the floor.. slowly at first, then gradually in larger and larger chunks, which causes the ceiling above it to begin to sag and leak, and quickly put the integrity of the home into question.
Spivey's novels is very much unlike anything you have ever read before and will read in the future, though fans of Blake Butler would appreciate this novel as the writing techniques are somewhat similar.
Thanks to Ben, and his publishing company Blue Square Press, for making this review copy available.
August 1, 2010
Roundhouse, punch, chop; there’s no room to breathe in the style and flow of Ben Spivey’s Flowing in the Gossamer Fold.
Eight chapters I read three times.
Two chapters I had to caress a second time.
A marriage dissolved and pubic hairs kept in the dash. I swear that’s all I’ll say.
Eight chapters I read three times.
Two chapters I had to caress a second time.
A marriage dissolved and pubic hairs kept in the dash. I swear that’s all I’ll say.
January 20, 2011
I made a video review for this book.
You can watch it at wingchairbooks.com
Click here to see it: http://www.wingchairbooks.com/2011/01...
You can watch it at wingchairbooks.com
Click here to see it: http://www.wingchairbooks.com/2011/01...
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews