Novel Explosives - by Jim Gauer (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

It's an otherwise ordinary week in April, the week after Easter, 2009. Late in the week, a man wakes up in Guanajuato, Mexico with his knowledge intact, but with no memory of who he is, or how he came to live in Guanajuato. Early in the week, a venture capitalist sits at his desk in an office tower in Los Angeles, attempting to complete his business memoirs, but troubled by the fact that a recent deal appears to be some sort of money-laundering scheme. And in the middle of the week, just before dawn on April 15, two gunmen arrive at an El Paso motel to retrieve a duffel bag stuffed full of currency, and eliminate the man who brought it to El Paso. Thus begins the three-stranded narrative of Novel Explosives, a fiendishly funny search for identity that travels through the worlds of venture finance, the Juarez drug wars, and the latest innovations in thermobaric weaponry, a joyride of a novel with only one catch: the deeper into the book you go, the more dangerous it gets. At the palpitating heart of the novel, at its roiling fundamental core, lies an agonizing reappraisal of the way the U.S behaves in the world, a project that grows more urgent by the day.

Review Quotes

"...big, brainy, trippy, Technicolor noir..."

-- "Starred KIRKUS REVIEW, August 15, 2016"

"[Novel Explosives] is a fascinating book, it's a difficult book, and it's a pleasure to be able to introduce it to you. I think that this is what my program Bookworm is for: to find books like this that are of enormous ambition and largely unknown to readers, and say, 'Hey, get out there! Order the book! Try this out! You haven't seen anything like this before!'"

--Michael Silverblatt "BOOKWORM, 89.9 FM, KCRW, July 20, 2017"

"A kind of absurdist quest... [with] Cervantes presiding."

-- "THE MILLIONS, January 13, 2021"

"An amazing novel, a literary masterpiece that reads like a thriller... the most fun reading I've had in ages."

--STEVEN MOORE, author of The Novel: An Alternative History "January 2016"

"Gauer's novel is a burst of fresh air, and it resembles a Tarantino movie in the energetic drive of the prose, the jumbling of time, unexpected humorous lines or scenes, quasi-rhapsodic passages about the quotidian, direct addresses to the reader along with other meta-fictional flourishes."

--Jeff Bursey "NUMÉRO CINQ, November 2016"

"Of all the books that we've promoted on this show, I think yours is the best, and deserves most the attention that it hasn't gotten.... I had a similar feeling of elation finishing this book as I did when I wrapped Infinite Jest and The Instructions by Adam Levin. The puzzle is so fun to solve. At the sentence level, this book is a blast to read."

--Matt Bucher & David Laird "THE GREAT CONCAVITY, Podcast, May 10, 2019"

"This is really a unique experience, and I already can't wait to read this for a third time. It's just fun to read."

-- "LEAF BY LEAF, February 15, 2021"

"We contrasted your humor with Thomas Pynchon's, who's a little more slapstick. Yours is more dry. There's more of an edge to it. But there's also an absurdity to it, which I find very winning.... One of the passages that really lit up with me [was when] you contrast a guy who's rotting away in Mussolini's prison with the act of eating a delicious gordita, which I thought was absolutely hilarious."

--Jeremy Kitchen, Michael Sack, and Jamie Trecker "EYE 94, Lumpen Radio, WLPN-LP, 105.5 FM, Chicago, April 15, 2018"

About the Author

Jim Gauer is a mathematician, published poet, and Venture Capitalist. Jim Gauer is a mathetician, published poet, and Venture Capitalist Joy Williams is an American novelist, short-story writer, and essayist. Best-known for her short fiction, she is also the author of novels including "State of Grace," "The Quick and the Dead," and "Harrow." Williams has received a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts, a Rea Award for the Short Story, a Kirkus Award for Fiction, and a Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction.