On Grant Maierhofer

"Elliptical, surgical, ... grim, smart, funny and syntactically menacing..."

-Sam Lipsyte

"Reading these beautiful shards of stories might make you feel okay for a while with your own loneliness."

-Kate Zambreno

"A new novel in an era where there can almost no longer be a novel at all, but information."

-Blake Butler

"Grant Maierhofer writes like someone who cut their teeth on jail and so should you."

-Sean Kilpatrick

"A luminous whirlwind of language, emotion and wit, Flamingos cuts through the lethargy and indifference of our lives and our lit with style and rage."

-Jeffrey DeShell

"Maierhofer is a relentless experimenter, someone who understands both genre and experiment sufficiently to torque the sorts of stories we think we know into truly unsettling and alarming places where, by the end of them, our skin is buzzing and we're not sure what has happened to us."

-Brian Evenson

"Grant Maierhofer's works is an unsafety protocol: how to saw your way out of a head full of hells."

-Joanna Ruocco

"At a time when the novel seems caught between the twin pillars of autofiction and agitprop, Grant Maierhofer's Shame brings us something new. Working in the tradition of Beckett, or Bernhard, Maierhofer cuts his self-loathing with tenderness, with melancholy, with deadpan wit and vulnerability. The result is a book that feels unlike any other I can think of: supple, kaleidoscopic, at once intimate and vast. A novel that seems - somehow - practically infinite."

-Matthew Specktor

"It's like Kafka's cockroach. It's like Stephen Daedalus yammering metaphysics. It's like Robert Lowell's ill spirit sobbing. It's like Henry Miller stumble drunk. It's like Kerouac in Mexico, wild, undisciplined, pure, the crazier the better. Thus the sordid erudition and crazy wisdom of Grant Maierhofer's Shame."

-Curtis White

"Naked, wry, obsessed with loss, fear, existential shock before our hyperbolic now, Grant Maierhofer's Shame is a stunning innovative serpent ever in the act of swallowing its own wounded, hyperaware tail and tale, reminding us on every page that nonfiction is nothing if not a troubled and troubling suburb of fiction where the self can honestly be told only in a series of jittery approximations."

-Lance Olsen

"Alternately raw, fiery, poetic, and sentimental, the author's take can ... show levity, as when describing tender moments with his wife ... when Maierhofer's cathartic ruminations hit, they hit hard."

-Publisher's Weekly

"Mr. Maierhofer writes like one exploring his own nervous system armed with only a scalpel and the language of his forebears. The title novella is a galvanizing and intimate confession of an addict of the American canon of miseries, a genuinely worthy nod to Berryman and co."

-Jonathan Lethem

"Grant Maierhofer's new short fictions, while akin in their fascinating skill and totalizing spirit to his brilliant work in the novel, are nonetheless startling in their deceptively unobtrusive real lifelike presence. Drain Songs removes even more potential obstacles to his talent."

-Dennis Cooper