Debra Di Blasi

Forthcoming 2010

Finalist in the Hodder Fellowhsip Novel-in-Progress

"...highly ambitious and of the deepest seriousness...with an evocative prose and an exotic, vividly imagined landscape. The consistency with which the writing invests everyday actions and objects with an almost erotic fervor is truly extraordinary...."
-- R.M. Berry, author of Leonardo's Horse, Dictionary of Modern Anguish, and Frank

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

“In her latest book, Di Blasi’s frustration with storytelling is palpable…. With The Jirí Chronicles one gets the sense that Di Blasi saw the divide between what she wanted to do and what she’d achieved and said something like the hell with it, taking a torch to old ways of writing stories, and the result is by far the most interesting thing she’s done…. It’s a huge step for Di Blasi, and a welcome one.”
–Tim Feeney, Review of Contemporary Fiction

"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

Critical Acclaim:

"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

"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.... In clear, resonant prose, laced with bittersweet humor, Di Blasi imparts her understanding of love's multiple ironies.
– The New York Times Book Review


"Debra Di Blasi writes about sex and love with thrilling originality and insight. Prayers of an Accidental Nature is a remarkable collection."
– Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize winner for A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

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