Author Description

Take several genre novels telling similar stories of love and death---a spy novel, a romance, an adventure tale---mix them together so that items and images from each start popping up in the others, add playful asides---such as a several-page historical digression on the etymology of the word "prison"---and a collagist's sensibility, and you might end up with the untethered celebration of writing that is novelist Rene Belletto's Dying. Built upon two obliquely converse stories---one of a man who finds himself paying ransom for a woman he's never met, the other of a man who fakes his own death to escape a woman whose devotion has begun to terrify him---Belletto's weird, funny, surprising, and wonderful novel cuts strange and circuitous byways through the landscapes of contemporary literature. --