"There's always been a natural relationship, even as a teenager wanting to be a composer, and playing at amateur symphonies, and later at professional symphonies and also playing jazz and accompanying singers, I always realized the words and the music were part of the whole."
"I was a pretty imaginative kid. But not Bizarro-inclined, per se. My life revolved around collecting and playing with Star Wars, G.I. Joe and Masters of the Universe action figures and vehicles...Mostly, though, I liked to draw... My illustrations were ok, good for my age, but not great, and I was always better at mimicking somebody else's artwork than conceiving of and creating my own."
"Denny had risen from the streets of Jersey City to become a successful merchandiser in the garment industry in Manhattan, until he became too rapacious, cut too many corners and the inevitable first indictment came."
"I was at David Amram's farm in Putnam County the other Sunday, and ... he talked almost non-stop about the people he had known over the years, not in a name dropping sense, but more as a natural part of the vivid narrative of his life, and then what he thought of the way things are today, never with bitterness, but always with an ever onward exuberance of well, where do you want to go from here?"
"And even as she reached for it, the letter, she wondered why she should read what any of the two of them had to say. But still she opened up the crisp white piece of paper,...and she read a little of what they had to say...the bile continually on the rise in her mouth. Something about the two of them being in love."
"The Law of Falling Bodies...is a brilliantly entertaining novel. Brenna's plain but poetic prose is matched in modern writing, perhaps, only by the famous poet of the plain, Cormac McCarthy. I foresee Brenna gaining national recognition like McCarthy one day. So I suggest book collectors snatch the first edition of this remarkable novel."
"Present throughout the collection, this pairing of the mundane with the lofty is used to address a variety of other philosophical concerns, ranging from the self to the psychological, even the supernatural, consistently dazzling the reader with her unmistakable narrative voice and stunning precision."
The Law of Falling Bodies, Duff Brenna’s brilliant new novel, is set in Minnesota during the Vietnam War. It opens with its protagonist, Virgil Foggy, lopping off the heads of dozens of chickens in the so-called killing field of the family farm in Foggy Meadow. …
"Kluge's imagery works well with the repeated themes and motifs in the text, which often address the nature of the afterlife while invoking metaphors that glitter and shine. By using comparisons to domestic existence to explore what lies beyond it, Kluge's book renders the unfathomable suddenly and disconcertingly familiar."