This Guy - from SD

If the book is difficult to break into, it is because Lewelling relentlessly runs after every
frustrating convolution that tempts the urban mind. Messages broadcast from the psychic
areas that must, for most of us, be avoided to keep on going. Convolutions that This Guy
needs, apparently; a life populated by theories, suspicions and obsessions instead of people.
This Guy may dwell, at the start, in the loneliest place, but by the end he has collected—
however brutally or accidentally—a collection of companions; he has gone over an edge and
he is loving it. Brooklyn Rail

Out of humble beginnings, This Guy becomes intellectual entertainment and
engagement of a high order, or so I overheard some guy mutter at Denny's, scribbling
revenge charts in three-color complimentary crayons. This is a book that makes you
believe that if you pick up a letter before getting on a bus, and as a result don't get
on the bus, your own life could well change. Change is inscribed in the very structure
of Lewelling’s sentences, and his plot is as mutable as wind. Ted Pelton, author of Malcom & Jack

The mind struggles to get to a place and time where it can do its work and make of
itself what needs to be made. Those few who succeed become strong and beautiful.
Through sheer desperate scrambling, This Guy makes it. His mind happens to be
psychotic, and his work is the labyrinthine kind of almost pure delusion. But by the
time he encompasses his “evil scheme,” he has metamorphosed, and this book is
suddenly like one of those dreams that come, with all their architectonic inevitability,
only a few times per life. Tom Bradley, author of Fission Among the Fanatics

With hilarious and devastating effects, James Lewelling’s This Guy is black comedy
at rationality’s precipice. It is Lynne Tillman urban existentialism. This Guy is anyone,
walking down the gritty street, looking in the mirror for more than the second it takes
to blink, trying to pay the bills. He is our wildest paranoid self, he is desperate not to
know what he is or might be in a world that makes it so difficult just to be. This Guy is
Samuel Beckett syntax, when Beckett imbibed the psychotic drug called the long sentence.
Elizabeth Block, author of A Gesture Through Time

James Lewelling has been writing fiction since 1988. To that end, he has made a living in every menial position available in the food service
industry, tended bar at the second smallest pub in London, The Swan, lost and found files for the Bank of Paris, taught Berbers the Beatles on
the edge of the Sahara, taught immigrants of all stripes the present perfect in Chicago and Milwaukee, been mistaken for a computer whilst conducting
phone surveys, been mistaken for an asshole whilst answering complaint letters for an insurance company, taught writing, creative writing, business
writing, developmental writing, reading, Russian literature and on one occasion, algebra. Most recently, he has been trying to persuade young basketball-playing
Emirati women to proofread in the United Arab Emirates. His work has appeared in Fence, Word Riot, The Evergreen Review, Café Irreal, The Stranger and elsewhere.
He lives in Abu Dhabi with his wife, the poet, Lisa Isaacson, and their two lovely daughters, Frances and Cecily.