Patchwork - (Nvla) by Tom Comitta (Paperback)

About the Book

"Tom Comitta returns with a novella that is at once a picaresque quest for a stolen snuffbox and a marvel of literary dâecoupage, equal parts love story, old-fashioned thriller, and absurdist romp. To whom does a story belong? Who is its author? What is an author? Does it matter? These questions and more populate the subversive and audacious Patchwork, a comical tragedy that highlights the connective tissue that joins stories to themselves as well as to the grand history of storytelling itself. Celebrating the tropes and cliches of classical novels while simultaneously forging them into an original narrative, Patchwork ultimately shows us that the stories produced by hundreds of writers past-celebrated or obscure, reverent or hilarious, factual or fantastical-may, in the hands of a master, become a single, seamless whole"--

Book Synopsis

Tom Comitta returns with a novella that is at once a picaresque quest for a stolen snuffbox and a marvel of literary découpage, equal parts love story, old-fashioned thriller, and absurdist romp.

To whom does a story belong? Who is its author? What is an author? Does it matter? These questions and more populate the subversive and audacious Patchwork, a comical tragedy that highlights the connective tissue that joins stories to themselves as well as to the grand history of storytelling itself. Celebrating the tropes and clichés of classical novels while simultaneously forging them into an original narrative, Patchwork ultimately shows us that the stories produced by hundreds of writers past--celebrated or obscure, reverent or hilarious, factual or fantastical--may, in the hands of a master, become a single, seamless whole.

Review Quotes

Praise for Patchwork

A Literary Hub Most Anticipated Book of 2025
A Millions Most Anticipated Book of Summer 2025

"Comitta has written a book that combines every writer and every book, but by isolating and exploring the elements that stories fundamentally share with one another." --Literary Hub

"Patchwork is not just a novel or an absurdist work of art. It is a reminder that despite the chaos of it all, human beings will always be connected with one another." --Sky Cross, The Columbia Review

"A must-read for literary adventurers seeking to navigate the blurred boundaries between reality, fiction, and everything in between." --Shelf Unbound

"Comitta's metatextual method offers. . . pleasures and surprises. An appealing literary experiment." --Publishers Weekly

"If you are an enthusiastic reader of John Ashbery--how his writing washes over you, leaving in its tide all manner of glittering linguistic debris--you will have a great time reading Patchwork." --Adam Sodofsky, X-R-A-Y

"An intellectual exercise crackling with madcap energy." --Kirkus

"A quite fascinating piece of intricately and curiously assembled fiction. . . . All in all (and there's a lot of that all. . .), it's good and very playful fun." --M.A. Orthofer, The Complete Review

"Every page is filled with enormous heartbreak and danger but also with enormous love and technicolor--a book that flies into your dreams and plucks magic from deep down." --Paul Yoon, author of The Hive and the Honey

"Tom Comitta builds a kind of disorienting beauty out of the madness, the emergent creation is profoundly alive." --Sergio de la Pava, author of Lost Empress

"A rollicking collage, an Oulipian page-turner, a surrealist's sojourn through the mazy corridors of literary history. Comitta's latest cements their position at the forefront of contemporary literary collage." --Alyssa Quinn, author of Habilis

"Tom Comitta refashions our extant texts towards ecstatic and fresh possibilities. A Queneau for our time." --Sebastian Castillo, author of Salmon

About the Author

Tom Comitta is the author of The Nature Book (Coffee House Press) and People's Choice Literature: The Most Wanted and Unwanted Novels (Columbia University Press). Their fiction and essays have appeared in WIRED, Literary Hub, Electric Literature, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Believer, and BOMB. Comitta works as a book designer and lives in Los Angeles with their partner, child, and pooch.