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Essays, Manifestos, Statements, Speeches, Maxims, Epistles, Diaristic Jottings, Narratives, Natural histories, Poems, Plays, Performances, Ramblings, Revelations, and all such ephemera as may appear necessary to bring society into a slight tremolo of confusion and fright at least.

Wier & Pouce

Steve Katz

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A Sun & Moon title.

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Wier & Pouce is a long story of stories, a bildungsroman spun to entwine in its form the years since World War II, the dislocation, the speed, the exhilaration, the promise, the brutality. With startling shifts in scene and perspective, Dusty Wier’s history moves from sandlot baseball, to college, to New York City, Nevada, and Vietnam, to the “other” planet Earth, to Cape Breton and the reawakening of giants in the earth, to the souls of men captured by tiny bats. The drive of Dusty’s moral vision is confounded by E. Pouce, his college chum, the embodiment and abstraction of evil, who could be Dusty’s epic opponent or a product of Dusty’s imagination. “Is Dusty a madman or a visionary?” Katz’s work seems to ask of us as readers. Our decision may reflect the future of our world and certainly will determine whether we read the work as a horror tale or as a metaphysical revelation. But read either way, this passionate novel—full of profound and disturbing humor, adventure, yarns, tales, and experiments—reads with the ease and delight of a 19th-century masterpiece, and is bound to haunt the imaginations of all who experience it.

Author of The Exagggerations of Peter Prince, Moving Parts, Saw, Stolen Stories, and other novels and collections of tales, Steve Katz divides his time between the University of Colorado-Boulder (where he is a professor), Paris, and Nova Scotia.

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"Steve Katz has brilliantly succeeded in codifying the American quest for the Edenic in this hilarious, often unpredictable embrace of emotional instability. In Wier & Pouce the characters test their relationships and their love in order to sustain a dream of tomorrow."
—Walter Abish

"Katz is a delight and a bewilderment—spontaneous, clever, unconventional in memorable ways."
—Chicago Daily News

"What Katz has done is open up another dimension of communication within the closed idea of what constitutes the novel.... A positive step into the unique atmosphere of today, it shakes off the past like a heavy, dull stone; it is healthy and bold (in a curiously modest way) and gives hope to fiction and the elastic resources of the human head."
—Seymour Krim