There's a very nice interview with author Shane Jones right here. Light Boxes is one of the most original works of contemporary fiction I've read in recent years. It's quite astonishingly good.He also has a new novel - The Failure Six - out soon on Fugue State Press that I cannot wait to read.
"This sick little fairy tale took me to a world without speech, a world of recycled bureaucracy, a place of tests and windows, foxes and leashes, men with green beards, extended onomatopoeia, geometric shapes everywhere, and certain execution. The thing is, Jones does all of this unassumingly. His writing is unadorned but somehow still poetic. This is a story about failure, but not just failing once. No, that would be too easy. These characters fail again and again, each time worse than the one before, each time more wary of punishment. I left this book feeling destitute, and that was ok by me. Shane's gotten a lot of press lately because of the well-deserved love of his first book, Light Boxes, but people, don't forget about this one! Love this one too! Shane makes me smile. Lily Hoang, Big Other
In The Failure Six, a group of messengers, who work for a vast bureaucracy, all struggle with the same task - to retell the life story of a woman named Foe who seems to have lost her memory. The irrepressible emotions of the messengers - and Foe's clear need to be left alone in her amnesia - make for a strange, unaccountable, untellable story.
In this town, speech is accomplished through stacks of paper so tall they touch the sky...the floors of a teahouse are built in seconds...and a mysterious character named DH threatens the town with bombs and his "Deliverer" who wields the world's most expensive revolvers. The Failure Six is a mystery grounded in Kafka, Gogol, and human dreams."
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