12/12/24
Nathan Dragon’s The Champ is Here is a loosely-linked collection that follows, with varying distance, an unnamed narrator, his dog and girlfriend or wife, from small American town to town. He tries on clothes in the mirror, drives by ladders hanging off bridges with his dog, surprises his “baby” with a roadtrip to Brown’s Lobster Pound. When a woodpecker disappears from the narrator’s yard, the stakes become existential. Even just him preparing a meal for his love for when she comes home from work can take on evolutionary implications.
From a distance, these seem like gentle stories about men who live ordinary lives in quiet towns. But come closer, and you will find anger, jealousy, paranoia, and a longing for beauty so vivid and fierce that it escapes language. Nathan Dragon is the master of the deceptively simple sentence.
-Merve Emre, contributing writer at The New Yorker
-Merve Emre, contributing writer at The New Yorker
Nathan Dragon’s writing illuminates the fog between words and things, intensifying our desire to see and understand both the fog and what lies beyond it. Saussure writes, “Without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula.” Dragon writes, “I’ve always wanted to build a lighthouse, so I am here.” THE CHAMP IS HERE serves as a beacon, charting a course by which the relation between thought and language is revealed as no less vague than radiant.
-Evan Lavender Smith, author of From Old Notebooks and Avatar
-Evan Lavender Smith, author of From Old Notebooks and Avatar
Nathan Dragon's miniature worlds of domesticity are sharp and voice-driven, with the compression of Diane Williams and the whimsy of Robert Walser stories. They are full of sublime beauty and longing, wringing your heart and reminding you what it means to be alive.
-Babak Lakghomi, author of Floating Notes and South
-Babak Lakghomi, author of Floating Notes and South
I loved THE CHAMP IS HERE, and found myself reading many of the stories out loud just to hear how the words glow. The stories are like postcards from a town contained within a glacier—far off and so wonderful that you grow wild to get as close as you can.
-Nicolette Polek, author of Imaginary Museums and Bitter Water Opera
-Nicolette Polek, author of Imaginary Museums and Bitter Water Opera
Nathan Dragon has written some of my favorite contemporary American stories.
-Kathryn Scanlan, author of Aug 9 - Fog, The Dominant Animal, and Kick the Latch
-Kathryn Scanlan, author of Aug 9 - Fog, The Dominant Animal, and Kick the Latch
Nathan Dragon's THE CHAMP IS HERE will burrow inside the muck and marrow of your life like all good writing should. These flash fictions cut like an X-Acto knife into thick cardboard, leaving behind beautiful and weird shapes that will read like a Rorshack test for the discerning reader.
- Robert Lopez, author of Asunder, A Better Class of People, Dispatches from Puerto Nowhere
- Robert Lopez, author of Asunder, A Better Class of People, Dispatches from Puerto Nowhere
People staring at themselves like the old man at the gas station stares at the gambling machine. Never losing isn’t the same as winning. “The short and long life of a one liner.” Nathan’s characters in THE CHAMP IS HERE are trying to be ok with what’s already there.
-Jake Lenderman, musician,
MJ Lenderman and Wednesday
-Jake Lenderman, musician,
MJ Lenderman and Wednesday