Publishers Marketplace: Joshua Kornreich

"Joshua Kornreich’s THE BOY WHO KILLED CATERPILLARS (Marick Press, September 2007) is simply the best debut novel I’ve read during the era of its debut. What is remarkable about this book is not that it is told from the perspective, and in the broken language, of an eight-year-old murderer, nor that its relentless narrative propels us to its illuminating and tragic end like the best of genre mysteries. No. What Kornreich does with unyielding force is build language. Kornreich’s traumatized child, who is learning language, builds a language. Kornreich’s child picks up words and sentences and builds a language. He takes a word and puts it next to another word and makes a sentence, but this is not a sentence we have seen before. Kornreich will try a word and then try another word next to another as his childhood narrator is trying to piece together whom he’s murdered. And while his childhood narrator is trying to remember what he’s done, and why, we learn his language. Actually, what Kornreich does to us is what only Peter Handke has done, in Kaspar (another rendition of another wild child): we are as thrilled by learning his language as we are horrified by the story his language finally tells us."
--Hotel St. George Press (review by Aaron Petrovich, author of THE SESSION)

"THE BOY WHO KILLED CATERPILLARS teaches us how to see afresh how sentences look and function on the page, isolating their sparse beauty, floating each in a small sea of white space, making each tentative, always ready to try a new version of itself, making each as obsessive about itself as the unhinged oedipal narrator is about himself, about his universe of childhood secrets, fears, trespasses, violence, voyeurism, a frightening father, an ineffectual mother, a bevy of bullying boys, a houseful of haunting revelations. Tight, clean, spare, this is the real deal."
--Lance Olsen, author of ANXIOUS PLEASURES and NIETZSCHE'S KISSES

"In a language all his own, a language driven by stutterance and repetition, Joshua Kornreich evokes and seduces the reader into a boyhood mythography where things are not what they always seem to be. At the center of this world stands Kornreich’s boy, a hypersensitive kid whose eyes and ears are struggling to make sense of a world fissured by his parents' marital unrest and his own invisible place in that familial world. What Kornreich’s boy-narrator is fascinated with most compulsively – the household dustbuster, the backyard tree, the bushes that separate one backyard from another, not to mention the mysterious brown residue that resides at the bottom of the deep end of the family’s backyard pool – is also the source of his most startling revelations. A first novel unlike any other, THE BOY WHO KILLED CATERPILLARS is a book of lingual daring and domestic disturbance that belongs on the shelf next to Gordon Lish’s Peru, not only for the singular way that it deals with the subject matter of childhood violence, but also for the sheer force and torque of its sentences."
--Peter Markus, author of BOB, OR MAN ON BOAT and THE SINGING FISH

"THE BOY WHO KILLED CATERPILLARS is stunningly original – a tour-de-force in language as well as a moving story of a shattered childhood. Joshua Kornreich is immensely talented. Keep your eye on this author!"
--Masha Hamilton, author of THE CAMEL BOOKMOBILE and THE DISTANCE BETWEEN US

"Truly close to a unique writing style...Kornreich's novel is about a young boy whose parents are divorcing, his father is referred to as Frosty the Blowman, and he (the son) goes through a pretty traumatic afternoon. And Kornreich is able to solidly get in the head of a young boy and force the reader to see EVERYthing through his eyes. It's a fascinating work. 5.0 [out of 5.0] stars."
--Emerging Writers Network

"THE BOY WHO KILLED CATERPILLARS is one of the most refreshing novels I have read all year. The story of one afternoon in an eight year-old boy's life is told poetically through the voice of the child. Joshua Kornreich's stream of consciousness style captures the innocence and vulnerability of its subject well, and his spare sentences and paragraphs add to the book's undeniable charm."
--Largehearted Boy

"THE BOY WHO KILLED CATERPILLARS is very much its own creature, and the reader who chooses to follow the story of Kornreich's Boy will not regret the decision. Much of the pleasure in reading THE BOY WHO KILLED CATERPILLARS does indeed come from the use of the language itself; once adjusted to the rhythm and flow of Kornreich's isolated sentences, the reader may find it difficult to imagine the Boy's story told any other way. Yet beneath his public image as a linguistic trailblazer, Kornreich proves himself to be a fine storyteller: outrageous and bizarre, certainly, but also subtle, perceptive and sensitive enough to win the reader’s heart."
--Meridian