Lady swallows a bomb in pill form (invented by her father), barfs up a dead bird and embarks on an excavation layered with murder, sexual politics, patriarchy, matricide and ancestral torment along with a parrot-faced cat girl, a boy on a donkey, a terrifyingly handsome lover/golem, an unconceived brother, a straight-texting friend who lives in a box inside a box and Medusa.
Advance Praise for Bombyonder:
"Some kind of war happened at some time or another and continued for quite some time to come. So begins Bombyonder, Reb Livingston’s blistering, kaleidoscopic, post-bomb-blast shrapnel-storm of a book. Bombs, masks, machinery, birds buried at the bottoms of women, emerge and recede in the blistering landscape. You ride in a vehicle with a thousand gears, each ratcheting the velocity upward. You will encounter Mrs. Butterworth, Home Depot, Rapunzel, Facebook, Leona Helmsley and countless others in a blur of narratives, dreams, texts and diary entries. When you reach for your seat belt, which you will, you will come up with Medusa’s snakes in your clenched hands. But Bombyonder is not merely a scathing, slicingly funny assemblage. Livingston devises a pulsing, haywire logic that somehow rivets the parts to each other and the reader to the page. Through the marvel of her language, the book becomes a shimmering whole; a miracle met like the first mirror.Bombyonder transcends any sense of “experimentation,” and occupies, essentially, its own genre. I came from a long line of fuses Livingston’s central character reports. Leave your cardboard containers at the door. Bring your own oxygen. You cannot be ready or more ready. The narrator tells us: Between a gauntlet of opposing dogs, she walked between two lines.This was her path. Livingston has delivered a fabulous, mind bending book. Honestly, I do not know how she survived the writing of it."
— Lindsay Hill, author of Sea of Hooks
"Bomb-pills, birthed birds, and the scorched Jacob’s Ladder of a story-stoked neural brinkdom—Bombyonder is a gestalt of grim and Grimm. The mind as bombsight. The mind as timebomb. The prose products that singe this portrait of the psyche burning are tooled like circuitry on a dysfunctional motherboard. Except funnier. Livingston’s unnamed protagonist—call her Psyche, Cogito, Dingbat, or even Carry—is endearing in her absurd quest for self-improvement. This is your brain on Bombyonder. We should all eat bombs and hack into our own Hera journeys. “
— Kim Gek Lin Short, author of China Cowboy
"I hope the world after the apocalypse looks a lot like Bombyonder: deliciously fragmented, breathtakingly poetic, and hellishly funny. And did I mention the dragon? Reb Livingston’s new novel is completely unique and utterly satisfying. I absolutely loved this book.”
— Tommy Zurhellen, author of Nazareth, North Dakota
"Bombyonder is a book of beautiful ancestors, not least of which is Gertrude Stein. Like Stein, Reb Livingston is concerned with large and small disruptions: small disruptions of the sentence, large disruptions of the world. The language is volatile, gleaming, and round. It goes off when you least expect it."
— Patricia Lockwood, author of Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals
