Cover by Claire Stamler-Goody
Inspired by a true story, The Serial Stowaway celebrates the audacity of her tactics and the absurdity of her encounters. Comic and penetrating, this novel portrays the strength that can hide in invisibility.
“I truly envy the way Robert Fromberg writes. His sentences are masterfully balanced. His narratives are constantly surprising. His latest book is terse, funny, poignant. It satirizes our profound self-involvement, celebrates random encounters, and studies the very idea of ideas. Suspending his unnoticed, unnamed protagonist in the air between absurdities and authorities, Fromberg reveals how little we hear ourselves, notice one another, or fathom the forces that give our lives meaning. A powerful, thoughtful work of art that really stays with you.” —Camden Joy, author of Boy Island
“Reading Gee, That Was Fun was disorienting in the best way, like reading Renata Adler as scatterplot historical reportage. Fromberg refracts the titular seven days into vignettes that set the absurd and the banal, the outrageous and the humorous, the fictional and the archival, on the same stage as the political theater of the Reagan era. What results is a riotous trip through shopping mall food courts and Senate chambers full of anarchic wit and an astute rejection of easy metanarrative in favor of a much wilder, and perhaps truer, mayhem."—Gabriela Garcia, author, Of Women and Salt
“With uncanny wit and a pointillist painter’s eye for detail, Gee, That Was Fun eschews the grand episodes on which historical fiction so often relies, reminding us that the fabric of our lives and the trajectory of our country, for good or ill,” are composed of the smaller moments: the daily decisions made and not made, the tiny revelations, the ordinary failures and triumphs. A fascinating and endlessly readable novel in vignettes.” —C. Matthew Smith, author of Twentymile
Essays and stories, including “My Life as the Wife of Harrison Ford,” “Two Weeks After David Cassidy’s 22nd Birthday,” “Vladimir Nabokov vs. Jacqueline Susann: Who Will Win?” “Ringo in the Time of COVID,” and “Failure as a Hobby.”
“As we learned in his memoir How to Walk with Steve, Fromberg possesses rare chronic patience—which, in turn, enables him to be an ultimate observer. Now, in this collection of dissecting essays, we’re reminded of how masterfully he can transpose his perceptions into essential commentary, at once able to welcome and scrutinize minutiae any lesser writer would overlook entirely.” —Gabriel Hart, author of Fallout from Our Asphalt Hell
“Fromberg has created a memoir that shines like polished bone.” —Patricia Eakins, author of The Hungry Girls and Other Stories
“Fragmented yet unified, direct yet elusive, How to Walk with Steve is a vivid memoir about family and geography, obligation and freedom. Fromberg has a remarkable ability to inject meaning into silence, into the cracks between sections, into all the things that remain unsaid.” —Brett Biebel, author of 48 Blitz.
“Never have I read a more authentic, deeply felt rendering of a child’s developing mind.” —Leslie Lawrence, author of The Death of Fred Astaire