Patchwork - (Nvla) by Tom Comitta (Paperback)

About the Book

"Tom Comitta returns with a novella that is at once a picaresque quest for a stolen snuffbox and a marvel of literary dâecoupage, equal parts love story, old-fashioned thriller, and absurdist romp. To whom does a story belong? Who is its author? What is an author? Does it matter? These questions and more populate the subversive and audacious Patchwork, a comical tragedy that highlights the connective tissue that joins stories to themselves as well as to the grand history of storytelling itself. Celebrating the tropes and cliches of classical novels while simultaneously forging them into an original narrative, Patchwork ultimately shows us that the stories produced by hundreds of writers past-celebrated or obscure, reverent or hilarious, factual or fantastical-may, in the hands of a master, become a single, seamless whole"--

Book Synopsis

Tom Comitta returns with a novella that is at once a picaresque quest for a stolen snuffbox and a marvel of literary découpage, equal parts love story, old-fashioned thriller, and absurdist romp.

To whom does a story belong? Who is its author? What is an author? Does it matter? These questions and more populate the subversive and audacious Patchwork, a comical tragedy that highlights the connective tissue that joins stories to themselves as well as to the grand history of storytelling itself. Celebrating the tropes and clichés of classical novels while simultaneously forging them into an original narrative, Patchwork ultimately shows us that the stories produced by hundreds of writers past--celebrated or obscure, reverent or hilarious, factual or fantastical--may, in the hands of a master, become a single, seamless whole.

Review Quotes

Praise for Patchwork
A Literary Hub Most Anticipated Book of 2025

"Comitta has written a book that combines every writer and every book, but by isolating and exploring the elements that stories fundamentally share with one another." --Literary Hub

"Patchwork is not just a novel or an absurdist work of art. It is a reminder that despite the chaos of it all, human beings will always be connected with one another." --Sky Cross, The Columbia Review

"When the lights go dark, I take comfort in knowing we will always have Tom Comitta's art. Their new book, Patchwork, is quite simply wondrous: it's like the love child of a Yorgos Lanthimos film and Anne Carson's poems, with a wild corner of a Hieronymous Bosch painting peering over your shoulder. Every page is filled with enormous heartbreak and danger but also with enormous love and technicolor--a book that flies into your dreams and plucks magic from deep down." --Paul Yoon, author of The Hive and the Honey

"This is insane. But insanity has always played an innervating role in the Novel. Tom Comitta builds a kind of disorienting beauty out of the madness, the emergent creation is profoundly alive." --Sergio de la Pava, author of Lost Empress

"A rollicking collage, an Oulipian page-turner, a surrealist's sojourn through the mazy corridors of literary history. Splicing together gothic, noir, mystery, horror, and adventure genres, Patchwork is a cubist painting of a book whose polyvocal pyrotechnics transform the hero's journey into a bibliophile's dreamscape escapade. Ludic, lively, and laugh-out-loud funny, Comitta's latest cements their position at the forefront of contemporary literary collage." --Alyssa Quinn, author of Habilis

"Patchwork is a dazzling performance of assemblage, of decoupage--a vertiginous literature of the archive. As with The Nature Book, Tom Comitta refashions our extant texts towards ecstatic and fresh possibilities. A Queneau for our time." --Sebastian Castillo, author of Salmon

Past Praise:

Praise for The Nature Book
Independent Book Review, "Best Books We Read in 2023"

"Symphonic, both in its structure--four movements, the third of which is the most distinct and the last of which references the first and goes out in a brilliant burst--and in the way language echoes, builds, works its accretive magic. Seeing the world like this, without us, traversed in a way we could never traverse it in our human bodies, is a powerful and exhilarating experience." --Cara Blue Adams, The New Yorker

"A marvel of textual collation on a par with Christian Marclay's supercut film 'The Clock.' It's remarkable how coherently the narrative reads, despite its countless patchwork pieces, a testament not only to Comitta's diligence but to the like minded ways that novelists have tended to write about natural phenomena like snowfall or sunrise." --Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

"A meditative, lush narrative on the relationship between time and nature. You'll be hard-pressed to find another book with as verdant an archive of beautiful descriptive sentences as the one contained in The Nature Book." --Darina Sikmashvili, Los Angeles Review of Books

"A magnum opus about the planet using only found text. A dynamic and singular reading experience." --Kirkus, starred review

"It's all this different, beautiful language synthesized into one narrative that mostly describes the environments you're passing through. I think it's amazing." --Jeff Tweedy of Wilco

About the Author

Tom Comitta is the author of The Nature Book (Coffee House Press) and People's Choice Literature: The Most Wanted and Unwanted Novels (Columbia University Press). Their fiction and essays have appeared in WIRED, Literary Hub, Electric Literature, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Believer, and BOMB. Comitta works as a book designer and lives in Los Angeles with their partner, child, and pooch.