Fabulations

Encompassing thousands of years, Fabulations is composed of minimalist short stories that straddle history and fiction, fact and imagination to tell stories as varied as the early effects of human civilization on our planet or the strange relationship between machines, chess and the human mind. These fabulations, intimate and panoramic, are imaginative periscopes that reveal part of our shared human experience from fresh, new angles. "De Piérola welcomes his readers into fabulous worlds, from distant places and times to familiar neighborhoods, from strange loops of reality to the stone and dust of our own cities. Each story is rooted in human desire, in real people, and there is an urgency in reading them, a reluctance to put the book down, as you might miss something. And you don't want to miss anything de Piérola writes. The spirit of Cortázar, Robert Louis Stevenson, Borges, Poe, welcome you into these fabulous places of the imagination.The stories are beautiful and heartbreaking." - Daniel Chacón, American Book Award winner for The Last Supper of Chicano Heroes "Fabulations is marvelous and startling: utterly original, gravely essential. Elegantly traversing chronology, geography and narrative structures, what is historically absurd with the protest of imagination, it provokes and disturbs, pierces and resonates, sings through Calvino's credo that literature is "the search for lightness . . . to the weight of living," handling terror, irony and humor all at once in the same palm, and so nimbly, that at times all we can be sure of is the measure of time. José de Piérola is a writer of extraordinary power. These stories are deftly rendered with such sensitivity that he arrives, through the fabulist narrative, at a masterful calculus of who through history we have been-and in so doing, ennobles who we can be, and who we are." - Sasha Pimentel, author of 2016 National Poetry Series Award winner For Want of Water