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There’s Something Wrong with Sven

Oct 26th, 2007 by gregorygerke

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Characters with strange names like Peter the Pirate, Mother Goose, Tiramasu, Deuce Billygoat, and Pawdy show up in Gerke’s stories, as does a cancer-ridden thousand-pound moth named Sven. Saint James makes a post-grave appearance, as does Vivaldi, albeit as a well-dressed, preserved, and—most importantly—silent corpse. There’s Something Wrong with Sven combines imaginative leaps worthy of Italo Calvino and Kurt Vonnegut with tragicomic irreverence of the George Saunders variety. 
- John Madera The Rumpus 

In Greg Gerke’s debut collection, flash fiction illuminates some of the same eccentricites of small town, middle American experience that Sherwood Anderson explored in his classic early 20th century story collections Winesburg, Ohio (1919) and Triumph of the Egg (1921). Like Anderson, Gerke reveals the core of strangeness underlying familiar societal conventions as grotesque, and depicts his 21st century “grotesques” as intimately familiar. 

Packing 54 “flash” narratives into a scant 144 pages, Gerke takes readers on a picaresque gambol through many of the leading tropes of contemporary American storytelling from the manic to the gothic, absurdist romance to mock epic parody, Rashomon-effect reverie to tavern patron’s tall tale.
- R.D. Pohl Buffalo News

Full of twists and turns, Greg Gerke’s debut collection is more powerful than fun; each character has flavor, the situations stick, the work is unique. There’s Something Wrong with Sven, but this book is right on.

—Kim Chinquee, Pushcart Winner and author of Oh Baby

With an ever-roving eye for the peculiar episodic at home and abroad, Greg Gerke lets plenty of little thrills bound out from these stories—though don’t look past the more tender moments in his carnivalesque travels. They are just as humorous as they are oddly endearing.

—Forrest Roth, author of Line and Pause

In There’s Something Wrong With Sven , Greg Gerke delivers dozens of short-shorts, each an absurdist world full of compassion and ambition, populated by surprisingly earnest characters who cannot help but enchant us as they pursue goals that are simultaneously fleeting and eternal. These stories contain big hearts and big laughter, as well as just enough of the sad and the weird to be both believable and memorable.

—Matt Bell, author of The Collectors and How the Broken Lead the Blind

One Response to “There’s Something Wrong with Sven”

  1. Lisa says:
    March 3, 2008 at 7:22 am

    Thanks for the link G!
    I’m looking forward to your reading this week….and hearing you read.
    Congratulations on all the publishing feats. You rock. I’ll read when I’m not at work! : )

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