Starcherone Books

333 pages, $16.00

Review by: Michael Christian

The stories in Jonathan Callahan’s collection The Consummation of Dirk, winner of the eighth Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction, for all their stylistic variation, often circle back around to meditations on suicide and depression; however, they offer readers maximalist descriptions and rambling coherence that when delivered via a serious intellect, bring singular, rewarding literary pleasure. Callahan intertwines dense, delicious, cake-like layers of Shakespearian allusion, train-based self-destruction, and easily the most compelling Dirk Nowitzki[1]-centric fiction I’ve ever read:

On horseback a young Dirk Nowitzki races teammate Steven Nash down a thin strip of floury sand along the lapping shallow of some sub-tropical sea, the duo’s long hair flapping like matched manes in wind.

Speaking of cerebral authors, it’s unsurprising that, in his sizable essay published in The Collagist exploring the prose styles of authors like Franz Kafka, Thomas Bernhard, and David Foster Wallace, Callahan reveals that Wallace “was [his] hero. He seemed to bring to bear on the problem both an almost inexhaustible ability to make scintillating sentences and a clear-eyed understanding of what that ability ought to be for.” The desire to pick up Wallace’s fallen torch and carry it to some abstract, glorious finish line is present throughout. Continue reading →