Patchwork

by Tom Comitta

Overview

Tom Comitta returns with a novella that is at once a picaresque quest for a stolen snuffbox and a marvel of literary découpage, equal parts love story, old-fashioned thriller, and absurdist romp.

To whom does a story belong? Who is its author? What is an author? Does it matter? These questions and more populate the subversive and audacious Patchwork, a comical tragedy that highlights the connective tissue that joins stories to themselves as well as to the grand history of storytelling itself. Celebrating the tropes and clichés of classical novels while simultaneously forging them into an original narrative, Patchwork ultimately shows us that the stories produced by hundreds of writers past—celebrated or obscure, reverent or hilarious, factual or fantastical—may, in the hands of a master, become a single, seamless whole.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781566897297
Publisher:	Coffee House Press
Publication date:	08/19/2025
Series:	NVLA
Pages:	200
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 7.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Tom Comitta is the author of The Nature Book (Coffee House Press) and People’s Choice Literature: The Most Wanted and Unwanted Novels (Columbia UniversityPress). Their fiction and essays have appeared in WIRED, Literary Hub, Electric Literature, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Believer, and BOMB. Comitta works as a book designer and lives in Los Angeles with their partner, child, and pooch.

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Patchwork

A Literary Hub Most Anticipated Book of 2025

“Comitta has written a book that combines every writer and every book, but by isolating and exploring the elements that stories fundamentally share with one another.” —Literary Hub

“Patchwork is not just a novel or an absurdist work of art. It is a reminder that despite the chaos of it all, human beings will always be connected with one another.” —Sky Cross, The Columbia Review

“A must-read for literary adventurers seeking to navigate the blurred boundaries between reality, fiction, and everything in between.” —Shelf Unbound

“When the lights go dark, I take comfort in knowing we will always have Tom Comitta’s art. Their new book, Patchwork, is quite simply wondrous: it’s like the love child of a Yorgos Lanthimos film and Anne Carson’s poems, with a wild corner of a Hieronymous Bosch painting peering over your shoulder. Every page is filled with enormous heartbreak and danger but also with enormous love and technicolor—a book that flies into your dreams and plucks magic from deep down.” —Paul Yoon, author of The Hive and the Honey

"This is insane. But insanity has always played an innervating role in the Novel. Tom Comitta builds a kind of disorienting beauty out of the madness, the emergent creation is profoundly alive." —Sergio de la Pava, author of Lost Empress

"A rollicking collage, an Oulipian page-turner, a surrealist’s sojourn through the mazy corridors of literary history. Splicing together gothic, noir, mystery, horror, and adventure genres, Patchwork is a cubist painting of a book whose polyvocal pyrotechnics transform the hero’s journey into a bibliophile’s dreamscape escapade. Ludic, lively, and laugh-out-loud funny, Comitta’s latest cements their position at the forefront of contemporary literary collage." —Alyssa Quinn, author of Habilis

"Patchwork is a dazzling performance of assemblage, of decoupage—a vertiginous literature of the archive. As with The Nature Book, Tom Comitta refashions our extant texts towards ecstatic and fresh possibilities. A Queneau for our time." —Sebastian Castillo, author of Salmon

From the Publisher