Stories by Andy Brown

I Can See You Being Invisible

To order click on title or logo below...

I Can See You Being Invisible, Andy Brown, 188 pp., 5x 8, Stories, November 2003

ISBN: 0-919688-83-7 (paper). . .$15.95

ISBN: 0-919688-85-3, (Bound) . . . $26.95

new writers series

I Can See You Being Invisible

This diverse book of linked stories is filled with off-centre characters and their flaws and burdens. Read about a one-armed baseball player, anosmiatics, a colour blind photographer, a time pusher and his best customer, intruders, the grape-picking diaspora, the whippet police, tree planters lost in the slash, a one-handed mechanic with a reputation to uphold, and many more. Also contained in this collection are the definitive ‘How-To’ guide to building a wall and tales of writers getting real jobs (William Faulkner drives a cab, Mikhail Bakhtin becomes a clown). With a craftsman’s skill, Brown moves from hilarity to foreboding, often within a single page.

Critical Comment

“Andy Brown’s first collection of stories converges on the discarded: rooms are provisional, existing until a stranger comes to the door and leaves with the balance of the fiction in tow. What courses through his veins are imagined histories, parallel worlds into which the reader might follow, pushing aside the curtain of a familiar photo booth to enter a world of the inexplicable, where time is the drug of choice.”

— Anne Stone

“I Can See You Being Invisible is a fine example of the kind of ‘underground,’ or even ‘gutter’ writing coming out of Canada. It has a stories about tree planters. It has stories where guns go off. It includes the word depanneur. It’s a kind of generational portrait....Brown’s writing is not the same old same old. His is a voice struggling to articulate uniqueness.”

— The Danforth Review, 2004

“...at the beating heart of this work of fiction are the interconnected lives of Isaak and Uzma and Antaro and Ursula, characters who seem to scrape by on the very obscurity and loneliness of their lives. The
true force of I can see you being invisible lies in the minor key dignity of its characters, told in a patient, respectable prose. At its best, the writing is shadowless.”

— The Montreal Review of Books, Summer 2004

“Brown’s sentences are as crisp as his vision is opaque... Read this for its tremulous intelligence, its bravado, its confident obscurity.”

— Hal Niedzviecki

“Representing many styles, many themes, I can see you being invisible is a challenge in a good way: it’s a book that makes you think about a wide range of subject matter and admire the writer’s skilful hand.”

— Ottawa XPress, 2004

“This book of linked stories is teeming through the bars, a zoo-like shelter for deranged characters with their flaws and daily obstacles. Brown is a pimp of the odd.”

— The Link, Concordia, 2004

“Brown has a way of making the familiar seem weird and injecting each scene with a sense of the strangeness of life.... I Can See You Being Invisible is a fine debut. ”

— Event, 2004

“Pick up I Can See You Being Invisible for its keen perceptions of our urban landscape; or better yet, give it a go for Brown’s revolutionary take on the short story. ”

— Carve , Spring 2005