ROD VAL MOORE
FICTION WRITER
“Oh, these are wonderful stories. Every one boundlessly inventive, unexpected, engrossing, edgy, and kind––their unsettled characters wandering, in all earnestness, full-tilt through the unhealthy environment of now.”
—Joy Williams
“Perhaps what impresses the reader most about Mr. Moore’s collection is its imaginative waywardness. The seemingly irrelevant or startling details and shifts in plot are so grounded in each character’s consciousness that their very implausability begins to persuade us.”
— New York Times Book Review
“Moore...artfully weaves this unusual family, set on failing farm in California in the midst of a blighted year. One ill-fated day, which begins with an ominous warning from the narrator, everything changes. Having previously suffered from rose dust poisoning, the son, Virgil, already “too old to live with his parents” but dependent on them nevertheless, falls to the ground and cannot get up as he has lost all sensation in his arms... Narrated with finesse, the tempered absurdity combines dutifully with introspective lone-liness and produces an enchanting effect. Luminous prose laced with dark humor, phantasmagoric imagery, and distinct and memorable characters make for a remarkable read.”
— Publishers Weekly
“In this sly and hypnotically gripping story of exiles on a distant planet where nothing is what it seems,
Rod Val Moore shows us our own imagination as both wonderland and prison cell. This is Huxley’s Brave New World as it might have been reinvented by Italo Calvino: part dystopic allegory, part epistemological mindgame, and always a brilliantly insightful investigation of the human soul.”
— Stephen O’Connor, author of
Here Comes Another Lesson
In 2015 Brittle Star received international recognition when it was nominated for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. All the titles are featured at their website, here.