In CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON, Gabriel Blackwell bends found forms to story, repurposes history, sets mathematics and a programmer's logic to generating emotion and wonder. This is the work of a talented storyteller slyly taking the stance of a documentary filmmaker, or else of a first-rate bureaucrat, perhaps rising quickly through our Ministry of Imagination—and with each new diagram and footnote and well-made sentence the philosopher in Blackwell provides us another piece of that most illusive of proofs, a verification of our shared humanity, captured here in all its absurdity and horror and glory.
Gabriel Blackwell is the author of CORRECTION, the short fiction collection Babel, the collection of essays and fictions Critique of Pure Reason, and the novels Madeleine E., The Natural Dissolution of Fleeting-Improvised-Men, and Shadow Man: A Biography of Lewis Miles Archer. Since 2013, he has been editor-in-chief of the magazine The Rupture (formerly The Collagist). His short fiction and essays have appeared in Conjunctions, Tin House and Tin House Online, Post Road, Puerto del Sol, DIAGRAM, The Adroit Journal, the Los Angeles Review of Books, wigleaf, Always Crashing, and many other places. He lives in Spokane, Washington.
"In Critique of Pure Reason, Gabriel Blackwell bends found forms to story, repurposes history, sets mathematics and a programmer's logic to generating emotion and wonder. This is the work of a talented storyteller slyly taking the stance of a documentary filmmaker, or else of a first-rate bureaucrat, perhaps rising quickly through our Ministry of Imagination—and with each new diagram and footnote and well-made sentence the philosopher in Blackwell provides us another piece of that most illusive of proofs, a verification of our shared humanity, captured here in all its absurdity and horror and glory." - Matt Bell
"Unique and compelling as the very souls they depict—from the unknown to the famous to the infamous—these stories are wildly inventive, sly, astute. There's a bit of Sir Thomas Browne (Borges, too) for the twenty-first century in these wizardly, magical narratives. The notion of 'pure reason' has rarely had a more subtle, comical, yet deeply humane alchemist at work in the great lab of fiction than Gabriel Blackwell." - Bradford Marrow
"Gabriel Blackwell's Critique of Pure Reason is a transgeneric textual labyrinth. Readers will take great pleasure in wandering these peculiar dark halls, encountering the shadows of Raymond Chandler, Sid Vicious, The Marx Brothers and David Lynch, to name a few." - Adam McOmber
