Run-On - by Phillip Garland (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Have you ever drowsed through the night with a sleeping infant on your chest, and you love your child but you just want him to get a little bit of sleep, and you want to get some sleep too, but that's sometimes impossible, and you're lost in a fog of exhaustion and dreams and love and maybe you did sleep a little, but now you're wondering if you're a bad father because what if your baby fell while you slept, and you're thinking about your own parents now and how they're gone, and plus there's all that lovely free-association stuff that happens when your mind is fragmented and sleep-deprived but still you need to go for a run, a quick run on the lakeshore even though it's cold but maybe, just maybe...can you go for a run?

Run-On is a remarkable literary work set in one night and morning in the life of a young father. It deftly captures the quiet moments of drama inherent in even the most tranquil domestic scenes--particularly the angst a new father must face when torn between the gentle but unforgiving bonds of love and the normal human desire to get away from it all, just for a little bit.

Review Quotes

"This is absolutely brilliant--a single glorious flow of words that starts in the utter exhaustion of parenting a newborn, circling and recircling, and by the end embracing everything from God to morning runs."
-- Kij Johnson, author of At the Mouth of the River of Bees and The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe

"In Run-On, Phillip Garland manages to capture the disorienting days of early-parenting, presenting the out-of-body exhaustion that accompanies caring for an infant as both mundanely terrifying and spiritually transcendent, even ecstatic. I inhaled this poetic rush of a book."
-- Erica Stern, author of Frontier: A Memoir and a Ghost Story

"A lovely short book that can be read in a single breath, the story of a father caring for his infant son, remembering his own parents caring for him, told as a single effortless thought. Run-On feels like Jon Fosse with its entwining of family, faith, past, and present, but also Lucy Ellmann with its sense of immediate domestic life."
-- James Elkins, author of Weak in Comparison to Dreams and A Short Introduction to Anneliese

"In the same delirious corporeal, religious, and atmospheric vein of Alan Sillitoe's The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner and Catherine Lacey's Pew, Phillip Garland's writing plunges into the gelid, protective, crashing waves of fatherhood. His prose performs a paternal act, rocking the reader into a trance state where sacrifice, ritual, and extreme fatigue merge. With the wintery, hallucinatory musicality of his language, Garland crystalizes a truth: in the prison of a chair, running, holding a child, a moment can become infinite--and infinity, merely a moment. Run-On strives for the impossible focus and limpidness that defines the liminal space between hallucination and insomnia, between profound attentiveness and fatigue intrinsic to care. Garland captures the lucid delirium of existence--the paralysis, the paranoia, the methodical dailyness and renders it with an unadorned, hypnotic clarity, like watching snow fall through steam from a teacup."
-- Vi Khi Nao, author of The Italy Letters

"In Run-On, Garland expertly conjures the hazy, sleep-deprived days of early parenthood while taking the reader on a journey through questions of faith, nature, aging, and life, all in one glorious, run-on sentence."
-- Lincoln Michel, author of Metallic Realms

"I remain as breathless writing this blurb for Run-On as I was reading it, captivated by Garland's relentless and beautifully wrought meditation on the love, joy, fatigue, and horror of parenting a newborn, and the effort required to survive it, and if not survive exactly, then at least ensure you somehow get to the other side of it, breath and life intact, yours, theirs, and the reader's, this reader certainly, and all those to come, who will no doubt be as enrapt as I was."
-- Ben Tanzer, author of After Hours: Scorsese, Grief and the Grammar of Cinema, The Missing, and Upstate

"In a single breathless sentence, Phillip Garland's Run-On captures the delirium of early parenthood to startling effect. Not much 'happens' here--a father tries not to wake his baby, has a cup of tea, goes on a morning run--but the miracle of this little book is in the near hallucinatory inner environment of its protagonist, John. John's journey on foot down the frigid Chicago coast is a journey into the innermost psyche of a new parent, and it's a strange, surprising, and ultimately revelatory place."
-- Danny Caine, author of Jewish American Dream and How to Resist Amazon and Why

"The headlong, confused, hyper-compressed time parents spend caring for a new baby rarely shows up in fiction because, I suspect, from a distance it doesn't seem narratively interesting. The new parents are mostly trapped at home; very little seems to be going on. But how wrong that is! Phillip Garland's novella so brilliantly captures the elemental, fundamental work a new parent's mind must do as it apprehends its world and itself through the terrifying lens of keeping another human alive. This book is moving and compelling and crisply accurate--I couldn't put it down."
-- Wayne Miller, author of The End of Childhood

About the Author

Phillip Garland is a writer who lives in Chicago with his wife and son. He received a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Kansas. His writing has appeared in The Kenyon Review, World Literature Today, Guernica, and Vol. 1 Brooklyn, among other places. Run-On is his first novel. Find him online at www.phillipgarland.com.