“Dylan Fisher’s The Loneliest Band in France is a feverish, terrifying gem of a novella. The existential doom of an earth careening into chaos pervades these pages, though it is filtered through the endearing, funny voice of a bewildered Sri Lankan law student abroad in France, whose simple quest for knowledge is interrupted by a homicidal rock band, overbearing host parents, and the desolate desire to feel something in a world that has stopped making sense. In fact, if Bolaño and Camus had teamed up in a parallel universe to write the liner notes of a lost Talking Heads album, they might produce a brilliant, wild work much like this one.”
—Dean Bakopoulos
“The Loneliest Band in France is seductive, propulsive, and drunk with narrative energy. Reading the first page of the book felt like stepping off a cliff, where the fall to the end of the novel was fast and dazzling—murderous vegan metal bands, and disappointed fathers, and Parisian streets, and Sri Lankan childhood memories, and music that kills all who hear it, coming quickly in and out of view until—smack—I, the reader, am on a French beach at the end of the novel, covered in sand, crying with the narrator and his father, wondering how they, how any of us, ever survive long enough to get a glimpse of who we are.”
—Rita Bullwinkel
“Far from home, alienated from his father, the narrator of Dylan Fisher’s The Loneliest Band in France accepts a dream-like, deceptively easy offer from strangers. In much the same way, Fisher’s smooth, hypnotizing prose leads the reader deeper and deeper into a seemingly straightforward and yet utterly disorienting world of unspoken truth and invisible threat."
—Maile Chapman
"Beneath the structural and absurdist conceits, there is an impressive and fairly universal story about a son, his father, and the weight of discovering what to do with one’s life. A memorable, cerebral tale with a frenzied mind and a big heart."
—Kirkus Reviews
"A novella that shoots from the page like an ancient wind trapped in a wine bottle, uncorked. Wildly funny, idiosyncratic, and moving. A daring debut that leaves us feeling, yes, this madness called life unfolds in epic locomotive sentences."
—Fernando A. Flores, author of Tears of the Trufflepig and Valleyesque
"With elegant, electric prose, this novella masterfully captures the harrowing breathlessness required to move forward in times of uncertainty. The Loneliest Band in France is an eerie, funny, suspenseful necessity. Fisher writes with his heart on fire."
—Alissa Nutting, author of Tampa and Made for Love
"Far from home, alienated from his father, the narrator of Dylan Fisher’s The Loneliest Band in France accepts a dream-like, deceptively easy offer from strangers. In much the same way, Fisher’s smooth, hypnotizing prose leads the reader deeper and deeper into a seemingly straightforward and yet utterly disorienting world of unspoken truth and invisible threat."
—Maile Chapman, author of Your Presence Is Requested at Suvanto
"To read Dylan Fisher’s The Loneliest Band in France is to submit, joyously, to a surrealist dream, a trance that is sometimes violent, sometimes meditative, and always psychologically thrilling. Fisher’s writing echoes the urgent introspection of Javier Marías while channeling the self-critical gaze of Bolaño’s literati, and the resulting narrative — a single, extended, saturated breath — proves wicked, immersive, and unforgettable."
—Derek Palacio, author of The Mortifications and How to Shake the Other Man
"Set at the close of the pre-Euro, pre-smartphone era, Dylan Fisher’s The Loneliest Band in France tells the story of a student from Sri Lanka who enlists in a heavy metal band with murderous ambitions. As he stumbles and falls, Migara né ‘Paul’ must recompose shattered bonds with his father and the tragic remnants of his origins. Written with an energetic breathlessness reminiscent of Bernhard, Bolaño and Castellanos Moya, this compelling first novella pushes experimental style even further into song in a performance that announces Dylan Fisher as a brilliant new writer on the world literary scene."
—Douglas Unger, author of Leaving the Land and Looking for War and Other Stories
"[The Loneliest Band in France] is an ambitious work of fiction, making the most of its short format, exploring pain inflicted willingly and unwillingly in the quest for happiness, forgiveness, and change."
—Witness
"Some quick math: If you were to extract the first sentence of Dylan Fisher’s novella, The Loneliest Band in France, and lay it out in a line, it would measure, by our calculations, 407 feet, give or take a subordinate clause. That’s 57 feet longer than the Luxor is high. Wild. The point, by the way, isn’t to reduce Fisher’s slim (70 pages) but complex book to a novelty: Hoo-boy, these wacky long sentences! Just the opposite, in fact: The math is just my brain’s attempt to wrap its little brain arms around an aesthetic experience it expected to be utterly familiar — reading a book — but which was complexified by a way of writing that defied my conventional anticipations. To quantify that feeling, somehow. And, indeed, to celebrate Fisher’s nervy, audacious achievement."
—Desert Companion, Nevada Public Radio
