with an Afterword by Michael Kimball
Release date: April 20, 2010
5x7"
104 pages
book design by Justin Sirois
$10 USA
Also available at SPD
Read reviews at Goodreads
- Andy Devine’s Words includes two alphabetical lists (words that should and should not be used), a grammar on fiction writing, nine alphabetical stories, and a 90K-word novel (condensed to 20 pages). Michael Kimball attempts to explain all of it in the afterword.
- Read Devine's story "As Day Same That the the Was Year" at Chapbook Genius
- Robert Kloss's Remix at Necessary Fiction
- Davis Schneiderman interviewed Andy Devine at Big Other
- Read the Devine interview with Josh Maday at elimae
- Read Devine's thoughts on prepositions at Unsaid
- Andy Devine dot com
"Andy Devine's Words is incomparable, utterly original, and a joy to experience. It is such a unique piece of art, that the first time you read it (and I imagine you'll read it many times) it will shock your sensibilities in the same way as the first view of a Pollock might."
--Jessica Anya Blau
--Jessica Anya Blau
"I dare anyone to sit alone in a room and read this book aloud. It's what I did, and I'm all the more damaged and alive because of it. The stuttering lucidity of Devine is perhaps too new and lasting for most, but Devine has arrived and his pages are here to stay. He is our first Neo-Phoenician. Each repeated sound desperately matters, as each returns from itself and boldly moves forth."
--David McLendon
“Words is unlike any writing by even the riskiest literary innovators working today. Devine has dismantled the English language to its elemental state and has used recognizable words to build a language beyond language.”
--Josh Maday
In Andy Devine’s Words, the reader becomes the writer and the text must be interpreted to create meaning, sense, sentences, story, plot, etc. Devine has discovered a way to fill a single page of fiction with thousands of words and his novel is an amazing feat of brevity and scope.
--Michael Kimball
On the Periodic Table of Language, Andy Devine is both hydrogen and lanthanoid; that is, devised both of our most common components, found there in all things, that which when forced to split will cause explosion; and at the same time, of a rare-earth: used as a catalyst, an ignition element in lighters and torches, an electron cathode, a scintillator. Where Devine devinely deconstructs before our eyes our words into their long-disguised periodic tables, we are witness to language not as we've watched it wrangled into mirages all these years, but a dismantling, a reminder, of the cells and syllables from whence we came, and where as both reader and creator we may begin again.
--Blake Butler
