Keene’s story collection is truly radical—in its politics, in its stylistic restlessness, in its rethinking of the myths we tell ourselves about race and sexuality in the history of the Americas.

In Counternarratives, John Keene undertakes a kind of literary counterarchaeology, a series of fictions that challenge our notion of what constitutes “real” or “accurate” history. His writing is at turns playful and erudite, lyric and coldly diagnostic, but always completely absorbing. Counternarratives could easily be compared to Borges or Bolaño, Calvino or Kiš.

A book of such richness that it’s hard to know where to begin. Keene fights, and does so with grace, an agile and often vicious wit, and a stubborn, cracking beauty.

Genius – brilliant, polished and of considerable depth.

Exquisite, and unlike anything I’ve ever read.

We have become accustomed in recent years to the revisionary spirit of much postcolonial fiction, but the ambition, erudition and epic sweep of John Keene’s remarkable new collection of stories, traveling from the beginnings of modernity to modernism, place it in a class of its own. His book achieves no less than an imaginative repositioning of the history of the Americas … Keene is that rarest of things today, a writer whose radicalism connects the politics of history to the politics of fiction.

Keene’s latest triumph…relentlessly bombards the reader with highbrow musings and skilful literary finesse. This work is an insatiable pursuit of racial recognition and redemption which ultimately develops into a galactic investigation into human nature itself, all the while sustaining the control and measure indicative of an accomplished writer, and a perspicacious mind.

Richly conceived and brilliantly executed, the most original set of fictions to be released so far this year.

This new story collection carves daring paths through the Western canon, reviving Jim and Huck Finn, Langston Hughes and Xavier Villaurrutia, sorcery, slavery, and colonialism. Keene’s blend of history and narrative, the familiar and the strange, reads like a furious Ishmael Reed channeling his inner Borges: careful yet caustic. Fans of “Annotations,” Keene’s brief, brilliant study of home, have waited a long time for his next offering. It is here, and it is brilliant and biting.

Counternarratives is a work of great distinction, a once in a generation work of short form fiction, moving the form on, deepening it. Few works of fiction operate on this kind of intellectual and textural level and still remain rooted in the human experience and a pleasure to read. […] Few novels are works of art and few works of art are moral acts – this is one of them.

Who knows what book of spells Keene used to conjure these hypnotic, quasi-historical tales involving mystical convergences?

Protean in style, erudite in reference, uncanny in effect, these stories and novellas inhabit, conjure, and invent characters written out of history by slavery, racism, and subordination.

Practically every sentence in the book perforates, stretches out, or pries open literary modes designed to be airtight, restrictive, and racially exclusionary…An expert generator of suspense, Keene also turns out to be a skilled humorist, a mischievous ironist, a deft, seductive storyteller and a studied historian.

Counternarratives proffers a series of stories in which religion and spirituality, art and language, violence and subjugation, homosexuality and eroticism, may shine through a panoply of voices.

Keene’s collection of short and longer historical fictions are formally varied, mold-breaking, and deeply political. He’s a radical artist working in the most conservative genres, and any search for innovation in this year’s U.S. fiction should start here.

Queering the script, defying the imperative to be silent, however, does not require confidence or a vision of what progress means. It is, rather, in all its uncertainty and risk, the most basic stuff of—the very matter of—life. It is also the crowning achievement of one of the year’s very best books.

Of the scope of William T. Vollmann or Samuel R. Delany, but with a kaleidoscopic intuition all its own, Counternarratives is very easily one of the most vividly imagined and vitally timed books of the year. I haven’t felt so refreshed in quite a while as a reader.

Keene exerts superb control over his stories, costuming them in the style of Jorge Luis Borges…Yet he preserves the undercurrent of excitement and pathos that accompanies his characters’ persecution and their groping toward freedom.

Keene finds inspiration in newspaper clippings, memoirs, and history, and anchors them in the eternal, universal, and mystical.

Only a few, John Keene among them, in our age, authentically test the physics of fiction as both provocation and mastery. Continuing what reads like the story collection as freedom project, in Counternarratives, Keene opens swaths of history for readers to more than imagine but to manifest and live in the passionate language of conjure and ritual.

Counternarratives is an extraordinary work of literature. John Keene is a dense, intricate, and magnificent writer.

Suspenseful, thought provoking, mystical, and haunting. Keene’s confident writing doesn’t aim for easy description or evaluation; it approaches (and defies) literature on its own terms.