Robots and Other People: Stories (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781643175812)

"In Final Report: The Horizon," in Robots and Other People (Graeme Harper, writing as Brooke Biaz), our narrator tells us the horizon could be a place but might better be held within time. It is neither "the point" prior nor beyond. The authority our narrator claims and the simple veracity of the statement speak to the multilayered beauty of this collection and the conundrum offered by these stories. Authoritative narrators ("Clock School," "The Lost Story," "Insects," or "Robots" ), "we" ("Living with Cows"), and "I" narrators ("The Abyss," "Underwater"), those reporting their father's stories ("Kidnapping Elvis") or detached but conveying others' experience ("Quail Stories") situate us in time-and then ask us to place ourselves in the past or what might be the present or an imagined but immediate future. We may not be sure where we are, but this artful work, thoughtfully playful and serious in use of facts and history and depiction of people and events, offers a metafictional clarion call- to listen and pay attention. If we focus only on the horizon-close but not clear-then we miss the chance to reach out in the dark, find the step, the pathway, then the iron gate, and pull it open, the same as The Abyss' narrator does.-Cindy Shearer, author of Stay With Writing: Practices for Sustaining the Writer's Work and Life

An abyss appears where once had been a front porch; a protest pops up as a Google Earth mapping van rolls down a neighborhood street; a child loses a story-such are the premises of Brooke Biaz's Robots and Other People, gambits that place the reader smack dab in the midst of contemporary life's weird whelm. What follows are accounts and ruminations, summaries and satires, omens and enchantments that are equal parts Steve Martin, Ted Chiang, and Franz Kafka-strange yet humane, absurd but honest, sly while companionable, and always alive with poignant paradoxes, insights and ironies. Crack open this book, and lose yourself in its whirl-and find yourself again and again and again in its haunting, funhouse mirrors. -Michael Theune, Robert Harrington Professor of English, Illinois Wesleyan University

Graeme Harper (writing as Brooke Biaz) is a fiction writer and Editor-in-Chief of the international journal, New Writing (Taylor and Francis/Routledge). He is Professor of Creative Writing and Dean of the Donna and Walt Young Honors College at Oakland University, Michigan. An honorary research and creative practice professor in Europe, Asia and the United States, he was a Commonwealth Scholar in Creative Writing and has been a writing fellow or faculty in Maine, Alabama, Texas and Michigan, as well as previously in Great Britain and in Australia. He was previously Chair of the Creative Writing Studies Organization (CWSO) and founding director of UK's National Institute for Excellence in the Creative Industries. Inaugural Chair of Higher Education at the British National Association of Writers in Education (NAWE), he served as a senior review panelist for creative writing and literature at Britain's Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), and as a reviewer of creative projects at the European Commission. His awards include the National Book Council Award for New Fiction (Australia), the NSW Premier's Writers' Fellowship and awards from the British Academy, the Literature Board and Arts Council of England. Among previous books are Releasing the Animals, (Parlor, 2022), The Japanese Cook (Parlor, 2018), Moon Dance (Parlor, 2008) and Small Maps of the World (Parlor, 2006).