Thin Rising Vapors
Description
Ezra Stern hasn’t seen his best friend from childhood and college in the six years since Abel suddenly quit a successful career in New York to live alone in a cabin in the Maine woods. In late November, Ezra receives a letter from an estate lawyer telling him that Abel has died and that he has inherited the deceased’s property in the lakeside town of Casco. That evening, as the first blizzard of the year approaches, Ezra leaves the city for Abel’s house. Over the next seven days, Ezra searches to understand his friend’s reclusive life and mysterious death by poring compulsively over Abel’s voluminous posthumous papers, typed on an old Remington manual. As Ezra becomes increasingly immersed in Abel’s writings, the coherence of the story of Abel’s life builds and disintegrates in successive swells. Ezra discovers in the center of what had been familiar something irremediably alien, and in the heart of that total otherness—the unbearably intimate.
Sagging Meniscus Press
252pp.
Publication Date: October 15, 2018
Available through Indiebound, Barnes and Noble, Powell’s, Amazon, and SPD.
Notices
Rogoff drops the reader in the middle of a snowy wood and then, like any good storyteller, slowly unravels how we came to be there and how the hell we’re going to escape.
—David Samuel Levinson
Thin Rising Vapors is a wildly gripping meditation on friendship, memory, storytelling, and the elastic fluidity of time.
—Allison Lynn
“Thin Rising Vapors is an electrifying novel—psychologically astute and richly textured, with an utterly distinctive voice.
—Molly Antopol
… reminiscent of Brian Evenson, Kelly Link, Shirley Jackson—even Kafka himself—Seth Rogoff’s Thin Rising Vapors will keep you gripped from the first page.
—Daniel Torday
If Rogoff’s first novel was periscopic, his second novel is impressively panoramic, as though Paul Auster had reimagined The Brothers Karamazov.
—Jacob M. Appel
Reviews
Review by Duncan Whitmire in the Colorado Review
Review by Thomas Urquhart in the Portland Press Herald
Review by Jacob Appel in The Collagist
Review by Anton Romanenko in B O D Y