Saint Sebastian's Abyss

In Saint Sebastian's Abyss, we are swept away by the hilarious and misguided preoccupations of two compulsive pedants, a comedy duo, whose misadventures are as irresistible as they are outrageous. --Rikki Ducornet There is a refreshing lightsomeness to the writing in Mark Haber's new novel about art and the absurdity of academic life. The mix of love and hostility exchanged between the two art critics in this novel is both endearing and ridiculous at once. Their territorial battles over the same work of art, their willingness to upend their marriages and much of their lives over a single painting, made me laugh aloud with recognition. An absolute delight, and Haber's love of writing comes through on every page. --Idra Novey Something about the deadpan confidence of Haber's work has the power to convince me that imaginary paintings are real, conjured writers have walked the Earth, and the sky is purple and filled with green clouds. We're all gullible neophytes before Mark Haber's breathless novels. Saint Sebastian's Abyss is one of the first of its kind by an American writer, a sleek novel about Renaissance art, rivalry between friends and devotees, the 'perilous promise of a dead canvas, ' and the meaning of the obsessions that orbit our careers (and what happens when we glimpse, even briefly, meaninglessness and the abyss beyond our singular obsessions). There's not a single sentence in this book that isn't ecstatic. To read it once is staggering; to read it again is necessary. --Spencer Ruchti, Third Place Books The master of absurdity returns with a tale of two pedants in search of transcendence (and, of course, a holy donkey). Haber's prose is hypnotizing, pulling the reader through his character-driven novel as surely as languorous paint strokes lead an eye across a canvas. Saint Sebastian's Abyss is obsessive, reverent, and so unique. --Laura Graveline, Brazos Bookstore I loved everything about Saint Sebastian's Abyss. A fantastic tale of the glories and tribulations of chasing an ecstatic relationship to art. --Matt Bell In Saint Sebastian's Abyss, art is the most important thing in the world, or the least; a holy calling or a pastime for narcissists; secular prayer or something that can be traded for sex. With exuberant wit and a superb array of fine-edged paradoxes, Mark Haber flays art of its pieties and pretensions, and when the cutting's done, he has us look to see if anything's left. --Adam Sachs Praise for Reinhardt's Garden Longlisted for the 2020 PEN/Hemingway Award for a Debut Novel The Millions, Most Anticipated of 2019 Texas Observer, Best Texas Books of the Decade Evokes Gertrude Stein, contemporary European and South American writers like Matthias Enard, Roberto Bolano, and Cesar Aira, with the Quixotic atmosphere of Werner Herzog films like Fitzcarraldo. . . . A strange but lavishly imagined tale of a hard-to-describe feeling. --Kirkus An exhilarating fever dream about the search for the secret of melancholy. . . . Haber's dizzying vision dextrously leads readers right into the melancholic heart of darkness. --Publishers Weekly Heart of Darkness viewed in a fun house mirror. --Library Journal Haber, who has been called 'one of the most influential yet low-key of tastemakers in the book world, ' is about to raise it up a level with the debut of his novel. --The Millions An enchanting story of satirical wit, dark humor, and luminous creativity. . . . An exhilarating grand adventure of passion, obsession and lunacy. --The Literary Review Outstanding . . . the descent into the heart of darkness at the very core of modernity. --BOMB Magazine Hilarious and thrilling. . . . This novel may look like something new, but it reads like that timeless treat, a rollicking good yarn. --Star Tribune The cynicism of Haber's book is tempered with a sweetness that gives it a lovely balance....an innovative piece of fiction. --Houston Chronicle An absurdist delight, a grand adventure of passion and lunacy, a brilliant book about melancholy that is anything but doleful. --Texas Monthly There is a strange, beautiful aesthetic in the spun thread of tightly, smoothly laminated prose. . . . to accomplish this art in narration, and Haber has, is masterful, touching on genius. --Lone Star Literary Life Every time I try to talk about fellow Texas bookseller Mark Haber's debut novel, Reinhardt's Garden, I always find myself saying different, rambling things about it. Written in one long paragraph, this feels more like a long, frantic piano piece, or like cutting through the jungle with a machete, and I recommend it to fearless readers everywhere. --Fernando A. Flores In prose as sure as a poison-laced dart, Mark Haber takes the reader on a delirious journey to the heart of melancholy. --Sjon Jacov Reinhardt and his faithful assistant roam South America in a quixotic search for the essence of melancholy--an enterprise that makes Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo, their rough contemporary, come off as a levelheaded pragmatist. To follow Reinhardt, fueled by amounts of cocaine not even Sigmund Freud could have managed, is to walk into a fascinating literary maze that spans from Ulrich Schmidl's chronicles to the decadent movements in turn-of-the-century Europe and Latin America. Melancholy has never felt more euphoric than in Mark Haber's breathless paragraph-long novel. --Hernan Diaz An adventurous journey into the country of melancholy. A fascinating dissection of human vulnerability. --Guadalupe Nettel Reinhardt's Garden is one of those perfect books that looks small and exotic and melancholic from the outside but, once in, is immense and exultant in the best possible way. Think Amulet by Roberto Bolano, think Nightwood by Djuna Barnes, think Train Dreams by Denis Johnson, think Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, think Zama by Antonio Di Benedetto, think The Loser by Thomas Bernhard. Think. --Rodrigo Fresan It's official: Mark Haber's novel about melancholy is a laugh riot. Narrated by the devoted assistant of pseudo-intellectual Jacov Reinhardt, the reader follows along for their increasingly misbegotten, cocaine-fueled adventures across Europe and South America. Told in one long, feverish paragraph with sentences that surprise at nearly every turn, Reinhardt's Garden is a gorgeous, joyful, tiny epic. I loved it, and more importantly it got me out of yet another reading rut. Preorder this bad boy from an indie bookstore or Coffee House Press please! --Annie Metcalf, Magers and Quinn Booksellers Praise for Mark Haber [Mark Haber's] infinite, fast-paced energy is transparent in the way these stories are constructed. There is no room for awkward silence or meaningless descriptions; everything fits as in a well-told joke that builds on its own momentum. His prose maintains not only a rhythm that seems like a continued punch-line but when it finally arrives at a safe landing place it delivers a terrible reality: the absurdity of failure in his characters' conditions of possibility tells us way more than what we expected. It is humbling and depressing, all at once. --Bruno Rios, Argonautica