Synopsis
An extraordinary collection of dynamic stories by an exciting new voice in American fiction, Gigantic features ten powerful stories of emotional stagnation and personal transformation, passion and violence, race and community, that are viscerally immediate in their impact and otherworldly in their scope. In "What Good Is You Anyway?" a struggling mattress salesman witnesses a horrific car accident at his bus stop and embarks on a wild journey that will lead him to put his life in order, beginning with his troubled relationship with his disabled alcoholic father. In "Quality Fuel for Electric Living," a sanitation worker, recovering from a romantic breakup and a painful hangover, suddenly faces a life-threatening situation while collecting an unusual deer carcass. In "Thursday the Sixteenth," a club manager dating the ex-girlfriend of a reggae singer unwittingly becomes entangled in a chain of events that ends in a violent confrontation. At turns comic and heartbreaking, and at all times rich with language and meanings that operate simultaneously on a variety of levels, the stories of Gigantic mark the arrival of an exciting voice in American fiction. "Impressive ... Ten lean and energetic stories ... Grimly funny, bleakly fatalistic, and emotionally true all at once." -- Chris Lehman, The Washington Post "Beautiful ... Nesbitt is smart, dark, and funny, like a young Elmore Leonard with a drinking problem." -- Sam Sifton, The New York Times Book Review "Nesbitt takes risks. ... with imagery, details of his characters' dead-end lives and even with structure.... Wonderful ... A talent to watch." -- David Wiegand, San Francisco Chronicle "Nesbitt sets out to blow his readers away with his debut collection.... He succeeds.... Funny, tense and horrifying." -- Carole Goldberg, The Hartford Courant
Book Magazine
The ten stories that make up Nesbitt's first book present a world where no one is really in control of anything: their passions, their future, their vehicles. Nesbitt offers a lot of wreckage and carnage but no one willing to take responsibility for the mess, not even the author. The prose is a loose amalgam of sentence fragments and one-liners that seem to have been written over time in a worn notebook kept in a pocket. The sometimes vague and directionless story lines seem like afterthoughts. Nesbitt's language has the ease of a casual conversation. The stories themselves suggest a wild, violent reality, moving freely between slapstick and tragedy, calm and calamity. Nesbitt's protagonists tend to be cool victims of outrageous situations, caught in a web of hoary chaos and left a little loony for it. The collection recalls something John Keats once wrote: "There is nothing stable in the world; uproar's your only music."
—Kevin Greenberg