Some trick - Helen Dewitt

For sheer unpredictable brilliance, Gogol may come to mind, but no author alive today takes a reader as far as Helen DeWitt into the funniest, most yonder dimensions of possibility. Her jumping-off points might be statistics, romance, the art world's piranha tank, games of chance and games of skill, the travails of publishing, or success. "Look," a character begins to explain, laying out some gambit reasonably enough, even if facing a world of boomeranging counterfactuals, situations spinning out to their utmost logical extremes, and Rube Goldberg-like moving parts, where things prove "more complicated than they had first appeared" and "at 3 a.m. the circumstances seem to attenuate."In various ways, each tale carries DeWitt's signature poker-face lament regarding the near-impossibility of the life of the mind when one is made to pay to have the time for it, in a world so sadly "taken up with all sorts of paraphernalia superfluous, not to say impedimental, to ratiocination."

Author of The Last Samurai and Lightning Rods, "Helen Dewitt knows, in descending order of proficiency, Latin, ancient Greek, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Arabic, Hebrew, and Japanese: 'The self is a set of linguistic patterns,' she said. 'Reading and speaking in another language is like stepping into an alternate history of yourself where all the bad connotations are gone' (New York Magazine)."

DeWitt's bracing experiments are risks worth taking.
Madeleine Schwartz

Brilliant and inimitable Helen DeWitt: patron saint of anyone in the world who has to deal with the crap of those in power who do a terrible job with their power, and who make those who are under their power utterly miserable.Certain stories have something in common with dreams: they're expressions of the creator's wish-fulfillment. Helen DeWitt's wishes are distinct in American literature?-?in world literature, as far as I know.
Sheila Heti

If there's any author bookish types trust to take them down the twistiest of rabbit holes with humor and winking unpredictability, Helen DeWitt is it. Take the plunge with these 13 short stories.

In this new collection, DeWitt maps a rangy and verbose urban landscape populated by couch surfers, VC bros, underpaid artists, a guitarist on a walkabout, mathematicians, two seemingly different guys named Gil, obscure European novelists and an itinerant heiress fluent in the tinkering grammars of probability, risk and global finance.
Andrew Durbin

DeWitt knows fourteen languages and is conversant in advanced math and computer code... she has harnessed her coder's brain to negative capability. Compulsive and very funny.

DeWitt's wide-ranging intellect makes these stories, but it's her sense of humor and profound humanity that make them work. She approaches her weirdos and screw-ups with keen-eyed honesty but also with sincere affection. And the first story, "Brutto," has one of the most satisfying closing lines ever. This collection has many delights, but it's worth picking up just for that.

DeWitt is the sort of artist that doesn't back away from her vision, and she takes the reader with her. A polyglot with a PhD in Classics from Oxford, DeWitt wields an immense intellect that, in each of her books, she uses to cynically delight her readers.

The picture this collection makes is one of a genius who is herself maddened by social niceties, and all the other tedious obstacles of the daily capitalist grind.

Her books assert (and often attest) that a work of fiction can encompass many kinds of knowledge-probability theory, scatterplots of data, tables of non-Roman alphabets-without compromising its form.
Lindsay Gail

I like dry humor with a stick of dynamite strapped to it. The forthcoming collectionSome Trickby Helen DeWitt, is probably the most recent example.

By the Book

DeWitt's manic, brilliant new collection...populated by geniuses and virtuosos, the stories are zanily cerebral and proceed with fractal precision.

There is much madness in DeWitt's method, a madness of pure logic. Hilarious.
Hermione Hoby



Some Trickseems less like a story collection and more like a series of notes from some vast, alien intelligence. DeWitt's characters are savants, weirdos, and artists, often trying to achieve their ends against the best efforts of the well-meaning and conventional people around them.

Annalisa Quinn

The most radical, off-the-wall, completely astonishing pages you'll read in your lifetime.... A small-but-mighty tome.

Filled with visual artists, writers, and agents, DeWitt's layered, sneakily funny collection reads like it came together over years of tinkering. The stories precisely capture (and often skewer) a certain type of cultural elite. With references to Borges, Kafka, Adorno, and Benjamin, among others, stories feature artists who must navigate the "go-getters" necessary for promoting their work. Funny and packed with knowledge, DeWitt's book masterfully juxtaposes lofty ideals with the banality of everyday realities.
Seth Satterlee

DeWitt reasserts herself as one of contemporary fiction's greatest minds in this dazzling collection of stories about misunderstood genius. DeWitt's disdain for those who seek to profit off of genius is sharp and refreshing, and her ability to deliver such astounding prose and thought-provoking stories constitutes a minor miracle. This is a gem of a collection.

Helen DeWitt combines literary theory, math, and satire inSome Trick, a cerebral collection of 13 stories that digs into the publishing industry, among other topics.

Angela Carone