Hi Everyone,
I hope you're all doing well and enjoying the summer. I wanted to let you know that my new novel, The Squimbop Condition, is up for preorder now, from the great people at 11:11 Press. I've been working on this book for years and view it as a capstone of the past decade of writing, connecting the worlds of Dodge City and Angel House and moving forward in a new direction, toward whatever the next decade will entail:
https://1111press.com/the-squimbop-condition
This book is also my first hardcover and is beautifully illustrated by graphic artist JR Duennweller, so I'm extra proud of it. These stories were published serially in the Southwest Review, one of America's oldest literary magazines, and the preorder comes with a special standalone story that the SWR is publishing in conjunction with 11:11, as well as the SWR's fall issue.
All to say, I hope you'll check it out, and preorder if it appeals!
Take care, and much appreciated,
David.
Advance praise:
David Leo Rice writes fiction with a seething ferocity, brilliance, and arcane imagination; the Squimbop Condition is a surreal and profound leap into the timeless art of storytelling. David Leo Rice is a writer I greatly admire. – Brandon Hobson, finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction, and author of The Devil is a Southpaw
Reading David Leo Rice’s The Squimbop Condition is like stumbling into the world of an unmade David Lynch movie, getting lost in the dream of it. Tracking the escapades of the notorious Brothers Squimbop, it plays like a roadshow presentation full of mysterious visions from a realm both alien and familiar. Like Richard Brautigan and Flann O’Brien and Samuel Beckett, Rice is a marauding magician, and he’s both deadly serious and deadly funny. The Squimbop Condition is a majestic and strange force of a book, a work of wild pleasures for our unsettled, damaged times. – William Boyle, author of Saint of the Narrows Street
I’ve always been a DLR super fan, and The Squimbop Condition is a new pinnacle. It has a joyful rhythm, a cadence that pervades the psyche until our concepts of self, other, relation, and identity tumble out topsy-turvy. I cherish the hours I spent with this book. – Charlene Elsby, author of The Devil Thinks I’m Pretty and Violent Faculties
Much like his titular characters, David Leo Rice is an agent of chaos, inciting literary anarchy with an aptitude rarely seen in today’s so-called experimental writing scene. The Squimbop Condition unleashes a barrage of questions so incisive it renders any and all answers moot; functioning simultaneously as a medical text, a historical document, and even a holy book. It is a diagnosis of our collective malaise. A prescient lesson plan outlining a new golden age of American fiction. – Joshua Chaplinsky, author of Letters to the Purple Satin Killer