Upcoming Titles

Berlin

A Novel by Michael Mirolla

A metaphysical detective story for fans of Auster’s City of Glass.

“As wickedly funny and hilariously angry as vintage Harlan Ellison.”
—Spider Robinson, Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon

“A funny tragic glimpse into the territory of the absurd, somewhere between Kafka and Vonnegut.”
—Calgary Herald

Merlin meets the Bladerunner in this macabre yet hilarious twisting of logic. The Berlin Wall falls. A continent away, a mental patient awakes from a two-year stupor. His escape from the hospital launches a surreal adventure in which past blends with future, and death is used to change the fabric of the world in a freakish experiment on transcendental philosophy. Like Kafka or Italo Calvino in the blending of real and surreal, this story brings the reader into West Berlin’s seamy underlife—the omnipresent wall, transvestite bars, sadomasochism; a secret world where a concentration-camp survivor sells gas stoves, a world of philosophical intelligentsia, adultery, and murder. Frenetic, kaleidoscopic, horrible, brilliant.

“Weird and wonderful . . . imaginative, unsettling, devilishly layered. Mirolla delights in verbal and situational sleight-of-hand, exposing a disorienting world of labyrinthine dreams and menacing recurrent images. Mirolla likes the macabre and grotesque, absurdities and stylistic play. He mercilessly exposes our alienation and primal fears, forcing us to face the awful possibility that we are no more than the product of our own devising.”
—Event Magazine

“Mirolla is acrobatic in his ability to bring off complex ideas rooted in metaphysics or formal logic (or both) in narrative fiction and still tell a satisfying story. His writing is engaging, polished, and economical. The formidable intellect that informs Mirolla’s writing, however, is in no way cool or detached. Here I think of ‘The Truth-Tree Method,’ which appears in The Formal Logic of Emotion. It is an intense amalgam of anger, regret, scorn, estrangement, sorrow, and a deep appreciation of life’s rhythm. Mirolla injects ferocity where many writers are content just to observe.

“So it is with Berlin. I am full of admiration for the way he pulled off the plot. He carefully telegraphed where he was headed, but still surprised me when I got to the end. Berlin is in the best tradition of metaphysical detective stories. No matter who seemed to be narrating, there was an attitude of affection and malevolence toward Serratura that was hypnotizing. It was the only thing that kept me from despising him. That and his continuing predicaments. I kept empathizing despite myself. I laughed out loud, inappropriately I suppose, when Chiavetta answered Ryle’s question about who he had killed. All in all, a delightful romp through the metaphysical muck. One of the best pieces of fiction I’ve read in a while.”
—Bill Turpin, former Managing Editor, Halifax Daily New

Michael Mirolla is a fortuitous amalgam of Italian and Canadian. Born in Italy, he spent formative years in Montreal and now lives in Toronto where he has pursued a long and exceptionally productive career. His work is known for its exploration of the surreal and twisted shrapnel of the human soul. He is versatile in almost every form of the written word in two languages, and has won major national awards in all forms of expression. In addition to his dark and intense novels, he writes short stories, poetry, plays, and movie scripts.

CATEGORY: Fiction
PAGES: 200
TRIM: 5.25 x 7.75
ISBN: 978-0-9815148-1-9
PRICE: $14.95 / Paperback Original
Pub Date: January 2009 

Back to Upcoming Titles