"Deeply romantic and darkly evocative, Adrift explores the shifting, oblique connections between failure, memory, and the forever-incomplete nature of desire." -- Greg Burkman, Seattle Times
Adrift in a Vanishing City is neither a collection of short stories in the traditional sense nor a novel. Although the stories stand on their own, they often overlap and characters from one story often cross texts to appear in another. All the tales, however, are skewered through by an axis of memory and its hazy recollections.
An odyssey originating in the small-time city of Pittsburg, Kansas, Adrift introduces the reader to Zirque Granges, a cagey drifter who cons his way through life; Blue Jean, a beauty who can’t shake free of Zirque; Pap, an incorrigible drunk; and the Duke of Pallucca, an insomniac whose nocturnal walks give rise to baroque reveries.
Bordering on poetry, Adrift navigates a landscape of obsessive love, dead-end streets marked by the invisible graffiti of the lives lost in them, and distant cities--Budapest, Berlin, Amsterdam, Paris.
In this book, space and time become so malleable echoes of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah whisper beneath the summer moon as it arcs over the fields in Kansas, bringing the reader to the understanding that everything is a part of the moment on which we stand overlooking our lives—the moment we call now.