The Wagners

Poetry. Art. The case of Wagner recounted here collects fragments from handwritten notebooks kept in the years following his death. The result is a poem that tracks many generations of Wagners, including a young Wagner who accidentally severed part of his finger as a child, a series of teenage Wagners coming of age in suburban America, and the son of Wagner, who suddenly learns of his father's secret family, and soon finds himself the father of his own. "This vivid, strange, and beautiful book put me in mind of the Russian Daniil Kharms. Like his work, it made me look at the world more carefully and more affectionately, and feel more inclined to see the magic in it."George Saunders "THE WAGNERS is an elegiac meditation on the egregore... an intense multi-dimensional anthropological assessment, by way of memetic engineering & sociological investigation, by way of black magick & in-the-clouds prose."Mike Kleine "THE WAGNERS is the most neat and elegant collection of outrageous surprises I've seen yet. Like the illustrations that appear throughout the book, each vignette is as bold and simple yet foreign as a letter from an extraterrestrial alphabet."Sarah Galvin "Everything that happens in THE WAGNERS wanders fearlessly through unending labyrinths of a tender surreality and its counter-realities."Stacey Tran "THE WAGNERS will set itself inside you. Read it again and again, that is how things will go. 'Once, he sat up in bed, shook with rage, and threatened to tell me something that I would not believe.' Oh I believe it and so will you CAConrad