Introduction

I am a novelist (proud to say so, and equally proud to admit that only one-tenth of one novel has seen the light of a bookstore) and operate under the belief that novels and people are ideally suited to each other. Reading a novel is all about the immersion of oneself in the comfortingly familiar incomprehensibility of life and living, in observant incomprehension, in the disorder and beauty of the houses that languages and minds build, in the disordered architecture of language itself.*
—Gary Amdahl, “Narrow Road to the Deep North”

“You are twice the man you think you are.” —“The Volunteer”

I said things like, “Had I only known…” but the truth was, well, I don’t know… … Continue reading Visigoth, stories by Gary Amdahl—an Appreciation