Vienna - from SD

Employing fanciful and sometimes unsettling juxtapositions of archetypes, ordinary objects,
and sentient beings culled from a variety of cultural sources, Lynn Hassan performs a
kind of visual alchemy that prompts us to revisit and reconsider their meanings.
Cynthia Farnell

Eugene Garber vivifies his characters in the most dazzling prose written anywhere. Indeed,
language is a demonic force in these fables, saturating 1900 Vienna in strange colors, soaking
into the soul like lysergic acid. Eugene Mirabelli, author of The Passion of Terri Heart

"What if a person passing through this deeply ambiguous conduit were to lose sight of the
border between dream and reality? . . . only we know how infinitely more exciting it is to
live there than along the humdrum margin between life and death." These quotes from
Eugene Garber's lush, elegant exploration of Vienna at the turn of the century might be
referring to his own giddily postmodern writing. Vienna ØØ, which I loved, is funny and
dark, mythic and modern. And sexy." Lynda Schor, author of The Body Parts Shop

In stories that travel from the cultural center of Europe to the primitive heart of the Amazon,
Garber inhabits a charged historical moment to probe—and play with—deep intellectual and
aesthetic dualities: art and science, genius and madness, passion and polite society.
Vienna ØØ is a delicious mobius strip of a book that examines the contradictions of the
human mind and spirit. A feast. Ron Maclean, author of Blue Winnetka Skies

In an era of endless spats over whether contemporary literature should be "experimental"
or somehow more "humane," Gene Garber quietly persists in producing work that is both—
a rich display of language as a solid, corporal, but also lyrical thing, a chronicle of the
imagined lives of characters, some of them our own gods of the previous century, who
gloriously bleed and smell and sing and die. The stories in Vienna ØØ are anything but
quiet. Flush with painting and music, Wagner and Vienna, egos and art and sex, they
take their readers on a wild ride through that city and that time, through the whole
dream/nightmare of an overarching Gesamtkunstwerk that fuels their characters' lives.
History and art, Garber always reminds us, are not interesting hobbies. They have
everything to do with life and death. Joyce Hinnefeld, Tell Me Everything and Other Stories

On Beasts in Their Wisdom:

In Eugene Garber's "almost real" stories, as Joyce Carol Oates once called them,
characters rather like you and me struggle to balance love and guilt, passion and obsession,
while shadowy but transcendent figures around them suffer on a mythic scale to put their
problems in relief for them. Underneath there is always a powerful story pumping and pumping,
carrying everything with it. Norman Lavers, author of The Northwest Passage

In Garber's uncanny tales the margins of real and imaginary, human and animal, give way
to an eerie domain of magical ambiguity. A bear occupies a woman's
imagination like a dybbuk, a randy goat transforms three lives, a woman has the
throat of a doe, a commuter flight turns into a mythic journey. These are provocative
stories, vividly written, and full of surprises—the work of a grandly talented storyteller.
William Kennedy, author of Roscoe

On The Historian:

Eugene Garber, casting himself as both Herodotus and Ned Bunting, has elevated
American History in the second half of the nineteenth century to the grandeur of a
legend about a mighty civilization of thousands of years ago. Kurt Vonnegut

The Historian is an extraordinary work of the imagination, six character-linked historical
‘fantasies’ that capture the comically hubristic heart of the American experience in a
compellingly witty and elegant prose. A wonderful book. Garber is quietly emerging as
one of the most gifted and original of the metafictionists. Robert Coover

On Metaphysical Tales:

Garber freely acknowledges his debts to such fabulists as Kafka, Dinesen, and Borges;
there is an echo of Beckett here too, and Joyce, and the Nabokov of the monomaniacal
rhapsodies of those works (Lolita and Ada above all) in which language of a frequently
clotted and self-referential intensity achieves its own redemption—its problematic liberation
from content, story, and “plot.” To say that Garber is audacious in some of his experimental
pieces is to say the most immediate—and the most obvious—thing about his prose. To say
that he is always “successful” is perhaps to mislead. He is generous in his enthusiasms,
which have a great deal to do with the numinous and ineffable moments of which Joyce
(that is, Stephen Dedalus) spoke so passionately, and in which Proust (that is, the Marcel
of the great novel) immersed himself with such astonishing faith. Joyce Carol Oates