Debra Di Blasi

THE JIRÍ CHRONICLES & OTHER FICTIONS

Selected as a Best Book of 2007 by writer-critic Steve Tomasula, writer-publisher Lidia Yuknavitch, and poet-critic John Gallaher.

"Agitated, angry, inventive, iconoclastic, both literally and figuratively graphic, the real Jiri Cech would both revere and rape Emily Dickinson, then bottle all the blue flies she ever imagined and make a balm to annoint the body of his beloved. Or at least the object of his desire. Here is a series of tales, in varying keys, of intoxication and revenge, intoxication with whatever seduces, revenge for being seduced. An oblique memoir of family, an investigation of a mother's misplaced life, flirtation with self-advertisement in the manner of supermarket tabloids, and above all the Chronicles of Jiri Cech, seducer supreme, rogue chauvinist, lover and enemy. Beware, reader, you're in for a sumptuous, hypertextual, hypercharged ride. Hyperion himself would smile."
–David Hamilton, Editor, The Iowa Review

"Debra Di Blasi's The Jirí Chronicles & Other Fictions is chaotic, brilliant and, like Jirí Cêch himself, possibly quite mad. With frenetic energy, Di Blasi mixes personal narrative with ad copy, traditional fiction with newspaper clippings, email messages, reportage, collage, and scholarship. The resulting concoction is consistently surprising, challenging, invigorating, and, most surprisingly of all, often deeply moving. Di Blasi has a mind unlike anyone else writing fiction today, and this is her finest work yet."
–Kevin Prufer, editor of Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing

"In Di Blasi's visual rhapsody, time passing is us killing and betraying each other; time stalled is our obsessive concern with the head of the spear. All our furies-fathers, the way roots rot, the puzzle of cross words, fathers-dance on the head of a pin, till we can't help but laugh. Rage, cradled in Di Blasi's brilliant hands, grows gorgeous. Mothers and trees from photos fade, and we enjoy an exquisite lack of orgasm, sobriety...and bears."
–Kass Fleisher, author of Accidental Species: A Reproduction

"Debra Di Blasi writes in a gray zone where literature, art and conceptual performance meet. Her prose reads like poetry or comes with scrapbook visuals. Her social comment channels Duchamp and his surreal cousins.... Yet in this intellectual funhouse, you have the same concerns that drive most writers: memory, family, love, sex. Death and decay hover closely. The engine that drives her new book is how people create their own identities. Call it the fictions and myths of real life. Among other things, Di Blasi suggests, we must wonder how our own fictions extend and compare to the 'big lies' that seem to permeate our social and political cultures."
–Steve Paul, The Kansas City Star

PRAYERS OF AN ACCIDENTAL NATURE

"Sex doesn't equal love – or does it? If it doesn't, then why do we expend so much energy on merging our bodies with others' while we so rarely connect in spirit? If it does, then why isn't sex enough to bind two people together against the world's insistence on ripping them apart? Such questions are among the chief preoccupations of Prayers of an Accidental Nature, Debra Di Blasi's arresting second book of fiction. Her characters struggle with the dichotomy of body and soul, the clash between the urges of the flesh and the desires of the heart and the inequalities of class, ethnicity, sex and age that magnify these conflicts. In "An Interview With My Husband," an American woman marries a younger man from Argentina. Their lovemaking is perfect, they are in love – surely this will last a lifetime? A year later, she finds herself on a rooftop, begging him not to leave her. In "Where All Things Converge," an extraordinary beauty gives up sex when it fails to bring her love; the lonely heroine of "Blind" recalls a past love even as she realizes that the passing of youth and beauty will now rob her, too, of sex. The pull of the flesh can't be denied: at times, sex may be only a surrogate for love, but it can be as essential to that emotion as oxygen is to life. In clear, resonant prose, laced with bittersweet humor, Di Blasi imparts her understanding of love's multiple ironies."
–The New York Times Book Review

"Di Blasi's themes of sexual obsession, physical beauty, and lost love ignite this notable effort to define the perils of intimacy."
–Publishers Weekly

"Debra Di Blasi writes about love with thrilling originality and insight."
–Robert Olen Butler, 1993 Pulitzer Prize winner for A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain

DROUGHT & SAY WHAT YOU LIKE

"Both Di Blasi's style and her objective distance and comprehension of her chosen subject mark her as a very psychologically driven, very talented writer."
—Publishers Weekly

"Di Blasi...is young, brash, hard-nosed, and talented.... Her minimalist style, in Drought & Say What You Like, is brilliantly detailed, like the eye of a camera looking outward at carefully chosen elements of the landscape that make an impression of the whole."
—Voices in Italian Americana

"What's interesting about Drought is how it sustains the tension between the generic elements of tragedy and its precise manifestation in the mundane details of everyday life."
—The Review of Contemporary Fiction

"Di Blasi is a bold talent and succeeds in a teasingly abrupt style."
—BookLovers

"A stunning piece of writing... spare and lean, sexy, psychologically charged and extremely visual.... A compelling journey into [Di Blasi's] own heart of darkness."
—Neon, Nevada Council for the Arts Magazine

"Erotic, earthy, humorous, sometimes shocking, always engaging."
–George Gurley, The Kansas City Star