Gridlock - by Brett Biebel (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

There's a 200-mile long traffic jam on I-94, and people are going to be stuck there for days. Maybe weeks. Told in striking, kinetic flashes, Brett Biebel's Gridlock explores the event, its origins in American political, athletic, and romantic institutions, and its impact on all the individual lives that go on in its shadow. Four roommates order a Japanese sex robot. A man designs a book review algorithm. Sentient pitching machines debate life, death, and violence, and bags of deli ham fly across trashy grocery store parking lots as the cars idle. Day in and day out. Their gears grinding down to nothing, or, well. Maybe it's something after all.

Review Quotes

"Gridlock is a brainy, poignant, thrillingly inventive guidebook to the Midwest, and to America, really, and perhaps to all human life in the age of big data and algorithm. Like few other writers Brett Biebel is equally attuned to the conceptual and the vivid, order and entropy, System and Heart. At the end of this book I felt as if I had been witness both to dazzling diagnosis and dazzling mystery."

-Chris Bachelder, author of The Throwback Special, National Book Award finalist

"Biebel's writing is scathingly funny, smart, and right on target in his stories about America's partisan divide. And yet when he turns his talent to down-on-their-luck characters trying to make sense of a world full of chaos, his work is also poignant and inspired, evaporating the gridlock that can blind us all to our own humanity."

-Leigh Allison Wilson, author of From the Bottom Up

"Each wildly different story in Gridlock begins with a terrific first sentence that announces the world of the story, then moves along at a headlong, hellbent pace that is totally mesmerizing to end with a perfect last line."

-Pamela Painter, author of Fabrications: New and Selected Stories

"Gridlock is a beautiful collection of delicious stories that lead one right into the next. Starting with the first set of stories about a traffic jam on a highway, cars backed up and the theories of what caused it, what will end it, what will happen to the abandoned cars. A riveting group to settle you into this journey of surreal, spec fiction, philosophy, everyday people doing not-so-everyday things, and small town folklore. Themes of obsession and exploration of identity, moments of reflection about human nature are combined with wit, satire, and a strong emotional pull. Beautifully crafted, these stories will invite you, no, tell you to read and re-read them as you get to know the wonderful landscape Brett Biebel has created. Very highly recommended."

-Francine Witte, author of Just Outside the Tunnel of Love

"In Gridlock, Biebel gives us the truest of Americana minutia with traffic jams and heart attacks and Spam, and then he brilliantly juxtaposes it with this sort of frenzied surreal whimsy, until we don't know which is which, and yet what we are left with is a renewed love of small town America and a deeper understanding of what it is that connects us all."

-Eric Scot Tryon, founder and editor-in-chief of Flash Frog