IN & OZ
A novel of art, love, language, music, auto design, mechanics, and reinvention.
IN & OZ is a novel of Art, Love, Auto Mechanics and two places: the here-and-now and somewhere better. Five men and women—an auto designer, photographer, musical composer, poet/sculptor and mechanic—find themselves drawn together when they begin to suspect that the thing lacking in their lives might be discovered in the other place.
Theirs is a Beckett-like world of drive-up windows and factories rather than sidewalk cafes: a world where the idiosyncratic is in tension with the mass marketed be it in music, automobiles, or thought.
When Mechanic realizes one day that he has always been a cog in the machinery of IN & OZ, he is set off on a journey of self-discovery. His struggle to escape a destiny preordained by his past has broad implications for anyone who has ever found themselves trying to be free within the constraints of their job, their class, but especially within a cultural moment much like our own….
That is, IN & OZ is about desire—the desire of Mechanic to speak authentically through the repairs he makes; of Designer to love through the cars she dreams; of Photographer to understand through the light he captures. With the economy of a Kafka story, IN & OZ hands us a fun-house mirror in which to see ourselves and the worlds our words conjure. Through the artists, workers, booksellers, and poets of these two places, we see the absurdity and humor of their condition. Their all-too-human condition. And ours.
152 pages, with an afterward by Pawel Frelik
$16.00 (paperback from University of Chicago Press) ISBN: 9780226807447. AVAILABLE$7.00 to $16.00 (E-book from University of Chicago Press) ISBN: 9780226807454. AVAILABLE
$25 (hardback) ISBN 1-892389-63-0. SOLD OUT
...IN & OZ may have permanently expanded the possibilities of the novel and presents a compelling take on aesthetics and its impact on society. Or perhaps it’s the other way around.
-Alex Flesher, The Iowa Review
…on every page...Tomasula's diction shimmies, his language catwalks....Thanks to his wit, humor, and philosophical insight, Tomasula is able to uncover how [creative] impulses are fundamental to our individual and social growth, helping us to shape and reshape those cast/s into which we and others have been kilned.
-Adam Kullberg, Diagram
In IN & OZ, Steve Tomasula writes as though the English language were his own invention. I'm far from certain he's wrong about this. But if we could still imagine a surrounding in which destiny lay within creatures and stones, or recognized the unconfinements of words, we might know fiction as he does. Next to being wholly new, IN & OZ is the best there is.
-R.M. Berry
…a strong, funny, moving mix of fable and pared-down poem…using strange new perspectives to reveal us to ourselves.
-Locus
So, art is the bad silence. Maybe, because it questions the world as it is and deconstructs all that is taken for granted. But it is also what what, along with language, makes humans human by displacing, transforming, recycling, in short, by bringing a supplement of complexity in the universe.
-Sylvie Bauer, The Golden Handcuffs Review
IN & OZ moves like a finely tuned, well-oiled car through the cloudy landscape of whimsical American Letters. …a novel of ideas and images…that would have made H.G. Wells nod with approval and a big fat grin….
-The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Not very far in the future, things are a lot like now only more so…. The walls of class do not fall, though, in this eccentric but worthy descendant of Huxley’s fatally bittersweet Brave New World.
-Booklist
With IN & OZ, Tomasula crafts a fiercely intelligent and uncompromising parable on what has become of us.
-Alex Shakar
The author’s signature intelligence, at once quirky, mannered, uncanny, removed, and satiric, continues to manifest itself in spades. … IN & OZ bears a family resemblance to Orwell’s Animal Farm in its political awareness and fabulist inclination, Barthelme’s Dead Father in its stylized absurdity and abstract intellect, and Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew in its fusion of cool aesthetic contemplation and fictive techniques.
-American Book Review
The whole book is full of thought provoking passages…. You’ll like this quite a bit.
-SF Reader
Beguilingly winsome, yet with a steel core, IN & OZ … is simple yet poetic and Tomasula’s narrative tactics … render a fabulist romance that’s very touching and amusing. The sheer innovation…of this book bespeaks what the small press does best.
-Asimov’s Magazine