The hypnotically cadenced monologue of Evan Lavender-Smith’s Avatar reaches us from such extremities of perversely perfected loneliness that, by elegant paradox, the self-haunting narrator deserves admission to the great, unconsolable fraternity of literature’s everlasting isolatoes.

GARIELLE LUTZ
AUTHOR OF STORIES IN THE WORST WAY

Avatar is a stunning work of linguistic pyrotechnics. Evan Lavender-Smith reveals how the fluidity of consciousness is mediated by sentences and grammar that, even in their absence, mark boundaries. With apparent effortlessness, Avatar underscores how language clarifies, unmasks, and conceals simultaneously. This is a book to be read and re-read, to be taught and celebrated.

SUSAN DAITCH
AUTHOR OF THE LOST CIVILIZATION OF SUOLUCIDIR

Through a process of carefully considered philosophical subtraction, Avatar renders opaque everything you’ve come to think of as transparent and transparent everything you’ve thought of as opaque. Lavender-Smith’s book is a moving and formally challenging meditation on perception and loneliness that never takes a false step. It feels less like cross-genre work than pre-genre work — it cuts through all our protective etiquettes of writing and culture to get at something important, essential, and painfully human.

BRIAN EVENSON
AUTHOR OF SONG FOR THE UNRAVELING OF THE WORLD

In line with Samuel Beckett and Djuna Barnes before him, Evan Lavender-Smith splits the difference nowadays between the “positively hopeless” and the “abso­lutely intolerable.” Crafted in pitch and endurance, and pushed perilously close to breaking point — its thematic location and leitmotif — these pages tell a cover story about the unwanted idea prompting a self to voice the reason of unreason. Brutali­ties of a century and ten years are contained in that ritual distress: totemic commonplace of the present.

ROBERTO TEJADA
AUTHOR OF STILL NOWHERE IN AN EMPTY VASTNESS

Avatar is a study in black and white of the aloneness of the alone, the meditation of a Beckett-like speaker trying to remember his way through a nighttime space behind the hope of a star or stars, haunted by memories of a rooftop, a staircase, a fingernail and the company of hair.

DAVID ANTIN
AUTHOR OF I NEVER KNEW WHAT TIME IT WAS

Avatar exposes the paradox of self-consciousness where, in order to know itself, the subject becomes its own object, but in doing so loses itself as subject, ending up suspended in a space between the knower and the known. Evan Lavender-Smith’s language unreels the real of the mind’s spiel, offering a Cartesian meditation on being numerous, and reinventing writing as fractal phenomenology.

ANDREW JORON
AUTHOR OF THE SOUND MIRROR

Like Beckett’s Texts for Nothing and Bernhard’s Correction, of a light out of no light, Lavender-Smith’s Avatar at once makes me want to kill myself, and to live.

BLAKE BUTLER
AUTHOR OF 300,000,000

A short masterpiece … Avatar might take place in the blink of an eye, or it just might be the snapshot of eternity we’ve all been hoping would never surface … Lavender-Smith writes from the fifth corner of the room and he does so without compromise.

Evan Lavender-Smith is carving out his own unique place in American literature … He brilliantly captures what it feels like to be utterly alone, isolated, set adrift, and the results are devastating.

This narrative, like the light of the stars, travels as both particle and wave … It exists so that we might begin to understand what it means to be a single point of light, in danger of eclipse. Let it and Lavender-Smith not go unnoticed.

A requiem, lodged between mourning and jubilance … Avatar felt like a return home, like the book was composed for me alone … I was stunned. Literally silenced by it. I was in awe.

A marvel of a book … Lavender-Smith’s Avatar unleashes language from its normal place, makes it something wilder.

Evan Lavender-Smith has emerged as a writer about whom hype-abused words such as daring might legitimately apply.

RAIN TAXI