Ryan Werner

I don't know if this is a zeitgeist thing or just a Ryan Werner thing, but I have yet to read any other writer who makes disenchanted ennui feel so charming and so essential, at least not today. Imagine a young John Cheever in the midst of a long Midwestern winter. Werner has been doing this kind of work for a while now, at least since he came into his own with his Our Band Could Be Your Lit project and his debut collection, Shake Away These Constant Days. But Murmurationdisplays that distinctive perspective in its full maturity, and brief as this little chapbook is, it's hard not to see in it a weightier work: evidence of a writer we'll be reading decades from now. I will be, anyway.… (meer)

Driving down the hidden roads of a world that they don't recognize but seems so familiar, the characters that populate the thirty stories of Ryan Werner's Shake Away These Constant Days, eventually find their way into the readers brain and become a mirror to our own hopes and fears. If you'll allow me to be lazy,maybe the better way to say it is; imagine partying all night with Raymond Carver and a Kiss cover band that plays Minutemen's Double Nickles On The Dime, whilst losing your breath over the girl in the corner ordering a hamburger, and maybe, just maybe, you might start to understand the secret language of this book.… (meer)