Publisher's Synopsis
Fiction. I love this book! Dennis Barone is a genius. The verbal, rhetorical, gestural, imaginative resources he orchestrates--or is it choreo-graphs?--or is it paints?--in ON THE BUS: SELECTED STORIES, exhilarate at every turn, and the turns (riffs, digressions, conflations, elaborations, subtractions, puns, and so on), tumble forth pell-mell, helter-skelter, topsy-turvy. 'Much Madness is divinest Sense--' became my constant comment reading these linguistically rich, emotionally wide-ranging and truly varying stories. Dickinson qualifies her madness definition with 'To a discerning Eye--'. Don't fret if you've not got one--in the convention of all breakthrough texts, Barone's prose instructs on the fly. 'Her whims, we said in those days, are our whereabouts'--and this, 'He doesn't so much wear the turtlenecks as stuffs them with the being that he calls himself': just two of Barone's ten thousand sentences of pure aesthetic pleasure. The Madness here is not to be missed--it's a celebration of language quo language married to the texture of existence.--Gray Jacobik
