The Consummation of Dirk

Winner of the eighth Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction, as selected by final judge Zachary Mason.

The stories in this collection have the texture of the long bad nights that one keeps to oneself and is prone to think no one else experienced. The gifted children contemplating murder, the husband drowning in melancholy, the pro basketball athlete finding his road to Damascus all emerge from adept torrents of words that bear comparison with Virginia Woolf and David Foster Wallace.–Zachary Mason, author of The Lost Books of the Odyssey

What we see in The Consummation of Dirk is a mind at work, a mind on overdrive, a mind that is relentlessly chasing down thoughts that tumble and slide and build and then circle back home only to be sent out into the world again, broken and beautiful. Jonathan Callahan’s stories are twisted and hilarious and brilliant and announce the arrival of an extraordinarily gifted writer.–Robert Lopez, author of Asunder

Stanley Elkin once said that all jokes are really about powerlessness. If that’s true, Jonathan Callahan’s various odes to failure, incompetence, and want are among the funniest jokes possible. Narrated from the deep interior of misery, the stories in The Consummation of Dirk are desperately, pyrotechnically, apocalyptically hilarious. But they are also, in their strange way, tender. This is work that sings across the divide of consciousness to touch us in our cages.–David Hollander, author of L.I.E.

Jonathan Callahan’s stories have appeared or are forthcoming in The Collagist, Kill Author, The Lifted Brow, Pank, Underwater New York, Unsaid, and Washington Square Review. He is originally from Hawaii, studied fiction writing at Sarah Lawrence, and has taught at SUNY/Purchase and in Japan.