Martin Riker

With "a voice as clear, sincere, and wry as any I've read in current American fiction" (Joshua Cohen), Martin Riker's poignant and startlingly original novel asks how to foster a brave mind in anxious times, following a newly jobless academic rehearsing a speech on John Maynard Keynes for a surprising audience In a hotel room in the middle of the night, Abby, a young feminist economist, lies awake next to her sleeping husband and daughter. Anxious that she is grossly underprepared for a talk she is presenting tomorrow on optimism and John Maynard Keynes, she has resolved to practice by using an ancient rhetorical method of assigning parts of her speech to different rooms in her house and has brought along a comforting albeit imaginary companion to keep her on track--Keynes himself. Yet as she wanders with increasing alarm through the rooms of her own consciousness, Abby finds herself straying from her prepared remarks on economic history, utopia, and Keynes's pragmatic optimism. A lapsed optimist herself, she has been struggling under the burden of supporting a family in an increasingly hostile America after being denied tenure at the university where she teaches. Confronting her own future at a time of global darkness, Abby undertakes a hero's quest through her memories to ideas hidden in the corners of her mind--a piecemeal intellectual history from Cicero to Lewis Carroll to Queen Latifah--as she asks what a better world would look like if we told our stories with more honest and more hopeful imaginations. With warm intellect, playful curiosity, and an infectious voice, Martin Riker acutely animates the novel of ideas with a beating heart and turns one woman's midnight crisis into the performance of a lifetime.

The Guest Lecture

After he dies, Samuel Johnson inhabits one body after the next, waiting for a chance to return to his son.

Samuel Johnson's Eternal Return

John O'Brien

Irving Malin

Senior Lecturer in Old Age Psychiatry John O'Brien, PhD

Jeremy M Davies

With the participation of editor and translator David Bellos, the Review's 1993 Georges Perec number is here updated to reflect the state of current Perec studies, and expanded to include a previously unpublished, full-length play written by Perec for German radio, as well as other new texts both by and about Georges Perec.The Review of Contemporary Fiction was founded in 1981 to promote a vision of literary culture that is not limited to the immediately popular, and to ensure that important world writers outside the popular attention continue to be written about and discussed. In 1984, Dalkey Archive Press was launched as an offshoot of the Review, and while the Press quickly grew into a leading publisher of world fiction, poetry, and criticism, the Review has remained the scholarly partner to the literary books, introducing readers to new authors and traditions or revisiting older writers whose works are of lasting value. Over the years, the Review has also published numerous anthologies of new writing from other countries, often of writers who have never appeared in English before.

Georges Perec Issue, Spring 2009

Review of Contemporary Fiction, Volume XXIX, No. 1

“A comic-philosophical novel, the other side of the same coin as Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being.” —The Wall Street Journal As a boy in an isolated religious community in Pennsylvania, Samuel Johnson sneaks off to watch TV with a neighbor girl—whom he eventually grows up and marries, only to lose her at a young age. When he too dies just a few years later, he inexplicably finds himself in the body of the man who killed him, unable to depart this world but determined, at least, to return to the son he left behind. Moving from body to body as each one expires, Samuel’s soul journeys on a comic quest through an American half-century, inhabiting lives that are as stymied, in their ways, as his own. A ghost story of the most unexpected sort, Martin Riker’s extraordinary debut is “a darkly funny contemporary story” (St. Louis Post-Dispatch) about the ways experience is mediated, the unstoppable drive for human connection, and the struggle to be more fully alive in the world. “Like a television rerun, Samuel’s situation repeats, but the story of his eternal return does end, as all books must, in a manner that is absolutely dazzling.”—Los Angeles Times “Unforgettable.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Martin Riker

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