On The Bus: Selected Stories

I love this book! Dennis Barone is a genius. The verbal, rhetorical, gestural, imaginative resources he orchestrates––or is it choreo-graphs?––or is it paints?––in On The Bus: Selected Stories, exhilarate at every turn, and the turns (riffs, digressions, conflations, elaborations, subtractions, puns, and so on), tumble forth pell-mell, helter-skelter, topsy-turvy. “Much Madness is divinest Sense––“ became my constant comment reading these linguistically rich, emotionally wide-ranging and truly varying stories. Dickinson qualifies her madness definition with “To a discerning Eye––“. Don’t fret if you’ve not got one––in the convention of all breakthrough texts, Barone’s prose instructs on the fly. “Her whims, we said in those days, are our whereabouts” – and this, “He doesn’t so much wear the turtlenecks as stuffs them with the being that he calls himself”: just two of Barone’s ten thousand sentences of pure aesthetic pleasure. The Madness here is not to be missed––it’s a celebration of language quo language married to the texture of existence. —Gray Jacobik Dennis Barone often mixes history, politics, religion and poetic story-telling into a heady mix in which all are transformed. Barone has proven himself one of the more interesting – and adventuresome – of American fiction writers. —Douglas Messerli