One of Southwest Review's Top 10 Must-Read Books of 2021 One of Dennis Cooper's Favorite Books of 2021
Collecting a decade's worth of stories by acclaimed author David Leo Rice, Drifter is a wild trip through the occult and surreal undercurrents of contemporary life. Ever in pursuit of illumination and unholy opportunity, the characters in these stories roam from blighted Western settlements to eerie New England circuses, from the backwoods of Austria to the remotest reaches of Japan, and from seedy Caribbean islands to the shadow of the Swiss Alps.
Blessed and cursed with the freedom to transgress all boundaries-between waking and dreaming, home and exile, even life and death-Rice's Drifters operate in the shadows of our world, revealing how frayed the fabric of reality has become.
Rice's fiction touches on the strange, phantasmagorical, and horrific, but juxtaposes those elements with headier explorations of narratives and the self; it's like little else out there. -Vol. 1 Brooklyn
Like peering through a slit at some brilliant, brutal new world, DRIFTER is unnerving and audaciously intelligent, full of wild possibility, dark humor, and lurking doom. With all the visceral detail and haunting logic of a beautiful, disturbing dream, Rice stylishly explores the grim, the hidden, the unhinged.- Kimberly King Parsons, author of Black Light
A grotesque spectacle of unreality. - Matthew Baker, author of WHY VISIT AMERICA
Somewhere Between Bradbury and Ligotti, Rice folds centuries of Americana into a space unstuck from time, where everything is an anachronism. Here, he explores the blurry divisions between adulthood and childhood, the seeming impossibility of atonement, the madness of certainty.- B.R. Yeager, author of Negative Space
I'm trying to remember the last time a collection of stories so captured my attention by the strength of its voices and sense of presence in each of its living moments. Think Brian Evenson's Fugue State, or Susan Steinberg's early collections. There's such life here, such clarity of vision. It's exhilarating to watch a writer like Rice engage his ambitions so immediately and with a seemingly inexhaustible well of ideas. This is a magnificent book. - Grant Maierhofer
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One of Southwest Review's Top 10 Must-Read Books of 2021 One of Dennis Cooper's Favorite Books of 2021
Collecting a decade's worth of stories by acclaimed author David Leo Rice, Drifter is a wild trip throug