Praise for 12 OXEN UNDER THE SEA
“A stylistic marvel. Strange, beautiful, horrifying, unique. A testament to the highest truth: the sentence rules all. There are very few writers capable of pulling off what Bernardini achieves on every page. I will happily return to these stories for years to come.”
– GABRIEL BUMP, author of The New Naturals and Everywhere You Don’t Belong
“Bernardini’s 12 Oxen Under the Sea is an arresting collection-presenting a credible surrealism, reminiscent of Borges and Julio Cortazar, and well-tuned to our very strange and frightening times.”
– MADISON SMARTT BELL, author of Toussaint Louverture: A Biography
“The stories in Bernardini’s 12 Oxen Under the Sea read like a series of fierce dreams — musical, surreal, plangent, nimble, and true. These stories belong together, and together sing in their own strange and invigorating key.”
– ETHAN RUTHERFORD, author of North Sun
“The volatile fictions in Craig Bernardini’s collection reveal an electric imagination shot through with fever-dream logic and a comic skew serious as death. 12 Oxen Under the Sea is eccentric in the very best sense of the word.”
– LANCE OLSEN, author of Absolute Away
“Craig Bernardini’s 12 Oxen Under the Sea eviscerates the soft, white underbelly of middle-class fiction. Babies catch fire and burn tableside, fathers transform into swamp things, and a pair of neighborhood freaks share names with an only child. What else to do but cast every last scrap of our identities into deep waters, and when nothing else remains, ourselves? Inhabited by assassin pianists, futureless boys whacking Ramen noodle hockey pucks across thin ice, whale displays hiding bones of fetid children who’ve crawled into their sanctuary, and rooms where things just won’t stay still, this prize-winning debut will knock your socks off, and a whole lot more.”
– MICHAEL GILLS, author of Burning Down My Father’s House
“What a wonder this book of stories is! In the absurdist, fantastic tradition of Kafka, Barthelme and Steven Millhauser, Craig Bernardini’s debut collection is very dark and very funny. Plus, every
one of these 12 stories has a river of heartbreak running through, a poignant reflection on the raging chaos of our 21st century world. An interminable hotel fire, a museum in whose crevices a kid may sequester himself, and a mysterious depthless pond are just some of the artifacts that Bernardini plunders for metaphorical, indeed poetic, treasures. Bravo!”
– KAREN BRENNAN, author of Rabbit in the Moon: The Mexico Stories
CRAIG BERNARDINI’s stories and essays have appeared in AGNI, Conjunctions online, The Gettysburg Review, New Ohio Review, and many other lovely journals. A graduate of Johns Hopkins (B.A., The Writing Seminars) and the University of Utah (Ph.D., English), he is a Professor of English at Hostos Community College, a City University of New York School in the Bronx. He lives in the mid-Hudson Valley with his partner, dogs, and chickens (cats RIP).
