"Reading Duncan can feel like being taken on a tour of your own dusty attic and being shown treasures you didn’t know you had." — Chicago Tribune
"Must rank as one of this year’s best collections. It’s on bookstore shelves now and deserves to be on your shelves soon." — Tor.com
“Whatever the topic, all of Duncan’s fictions are united by an evocative, playful, and deeply accomplished storytelling style. Highly recommended for fans of Kelly Link or other slipstream writers, and for any reader looking to lose themselves in an engaging and fun reading experience.”
— Booklist (starred review)
"Zany and kaleidoscopic, the 12 stories in Duncan’s third collection draw on Southern traditions of tall tales and span time periods, continents, and the realm of human imagination to create an intricate new mythology of figures from history, literature, and American folklore. . . . This is a raucous, fantastical treat."
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A rare book that blends fun with fury and tomfoolery with social consciousness." — Kirkus Reviews
“An Agent of Utopia is all the proof you’ll need to see that Andy Duncan is one of the very best short story writers in Science Fiction, Fantasy, or anywhere else. It’s a sure bet that you’re holding in your hand the best story collection of the year.”— Jeffrey Ford, author of A Natural History of Hell
"Duncan will get you to bust a a gut laughing. He'll make you teary, and put a shiver up your spine. But most importantly, his stories ask questions you might not know how to answer, and leave you looking inside yourself long after you've read the last line of his singing prose.” — Lara Elena Donnelly, author of Amberlough
“Andy Duncan’s unique voice shines through in his third collection. You’ve not read him yet? Shame on you! Go out now and buy An Agent of Utopia: New and Selected Stories. You’ll thank me.” — Ellen Datlow, award-winning editor
"Andy Duncan is one of the most hilarious and poignant writers of short stories that we have. He effortlessly forges dreamlike and nightmarish tales with wit and wisdom that rivals Mark Twain.” — Christopher Barzak, author of Wonders of the Invisible World
“Andy Duncan is the Andy Duncan of Andy Duncanland, and we are all lucky to have access to that fabled locale via the portal between his brain and these pages. The stories in this collection drip with magic and mayhem and time and place and personhood, along with the most creative cussing this side of anywhere. Each one is a microcosm, a moment from our own history, real or imagined, passed along to us by a master storyteller. “ — Sarah Pinsker
“Andy Duncan is the best storyteller of our generation. Every page is breathtaking, down-to-earth magical.” — Ellen Klages
“Andy Duncan’s work bursts on the tongue. Every word is a rhythm, perfectly shaped to thrum in the throat, to twang in the mouth, to dance on beats of breath. His dialogue drums savory dialects. His prose is a brass instrument, trumpeting stories like songs. Like blues, like jazz, his stories are written to an American tempo, her checkered history, her bright syncopation, her cacophony of Southern storytellers and conjuring women. He is a musician, magician, mythmaker, a raconteur of marvels.” — Rachel Swirsky
2018-09-02
Stories that borrow from American folklore, history, and a plethora of literary sources to forge fantasy worlds that are intimately familiar.
Duncan (The Pottawatomie Giant and Other Stories, 2012, etc.) reasserts his down-home voice in this new collection of Southern fabulist tales. Often told in the first person, the stories tease the reader with echoes of historical fact and biography that slowly unfold into sociopolitical commentary. In some tales, this cultural consciousness is overt. The title story, for example, sees an actual agent of Thomas More's fictional Utopia infiltrating 16th-century London in an attempt to rescue More from the Tower. When her mission fails, she becomes haunted by the profane voice of More's severed head and stays in England in an attempt to find the freedom offered by an imperfect society. Along the same lines, "Senator Bilbo" finds the many-times-great-grandson of Tolkien's Bilbo Baggins a powerful political figure in the Shire advancing his agenda of racial purity in the face of a globalizing Middle-earth. Other stories flirt more subtly with their themes. In "Zora and the Zombie," a fictionalized Zora Neale Hurston explores both the power and vulnerability of her femininity while researching her real-life ethnographic study of Haitian voodoo practices. In "Beluthahatchie," the African-American trickster character High John the Conqueror is blended with the scarcely less mythic personality of bluesman Robert Johnson to explore the dynamics of institutionalized racial oppression and resistance in hell. As lofty as Duncan's goals can sometimes be, the tenderness, humor, and sheer gumption of his voices make the collection both winsome and engaging. Of note, however, is the fact that the author uses racially insensitive language which, while historically accurate and appropriate to the voices of his characters, is not his to speak. Readers will have to decide for themselves whether Duncan's use of African-American folk forms and the stories' firm championing of the oppressed justify the employment of language that lands so harshly on the ear. Occasionally, the author loses his way in the maze of his references, and the stories suffer from a tendency to ramble, but even the most gabby of these tales has the power to startle the reader into realizations about their own time and place that are only possible when seen through the lens of make-believe.
A rare book that blends fun with fury and tomfoolery with social consciousness.
