GLANTZ
now available to order
GLANTZ is now available from Equus Press … you can order a copy here.
“Set against a backdrop of shoddy bars, shoddier streets, and a shoddier still society in slow collapse, GLANTZ traces the movements (and stasis) of its eponymous anti-hero: a figure perpetually on the verge of speech, prayer, and confession, yet caught in a spiral of waiting, repetition, and failed transcendence. In this book, Tobias Ryan delivers a claustrophobic study of inertia, conscience, and the paralytic rituals of everyday life – a novel of failed routines and the stubborn residue of memory.
The novel unfolds as a series of minor scenes—meals half-eaten, prayers unspoken, notebooks left blank—where nothing seems to happen, and yet where history, violence, and memory seep into every silence. GLANTZ tests the novel form at its limits, interrogating how narrative itself falters when confronted with lives lived under the sign of exhaustion. Ryan’s prose clings to the observational intensity of Robbe-Grillet while steeped in the noirish atmospherics of Equus Press: lives lived in suspension between catastrophe and paralysis. GLANTZ’s syntax performs its subject: recursive, hesitant, attuned to the granular detail of a man staring into his own hands for meaning.”
— David Vichner, Equus Press
In reading GLANTZ, one feels oneself transported into a painting by De Chirico: bright yet airless, streaked with shadows much bigger than they ought to be, adorned in ways that estrange us from all our creature comforts.
—Benjamin Libman
This is an expressionism-adjacent headzone that a lot of Anglophone writers can’t bear to stay in. Ryan is a far more adept, uneasily-at-ease cartographer. He’s ‘one of the clear-eyed among us,’ as the barman in GLANTZ puts it – ‘those who can see in the dark.’
—Tim MacGabhann
(Tim’s full thoughts can be found at 3:AM Magazine. )
The quiet horror of existence runs through this unsettling and beautifully restrained novel; Tobias Ryan turns silence into revelation, every omission charged with meaning.
—Fernando Sdrigotti
Ryan’s debut novel is a spare and haunting study of a man learning how to live inside an absence he’s made his own.
—Christina Tudor-Sideri
A “prelude” to the novel can be read @ Firmament Magazine.
With thanks to the blurbers, early readers and especially Yanina Spizzirri for her incredible work on the cover.