An absorbing literary experiment by the McSweeney’s contributor and Mary Shelly Award-winning author of TOC: A New Media Novel.
Steve Tomasula is a novelist like no other; his experiments in narrative and design have won him a loyal following as well as a number of awards. Exemplifying Tomasula’s style, IN & OZ is a heady, avant-garde book, rooted in convincing characters even as it subverts the genre of novel and moves it forward.
IN & OZ is a novel of art, love, and auto mechanics. The story follows five different characters—an auto designer, photographer, musical composer, poet/sculptor, and mechanic—who live in two very different places: IN, a back-alley here and now; and OZ, which reflects the desire for somewhere better. As the residents of each place strive to fill the void in their lives through a variety of media—music, language, dirt, light, and automobiles—their stories begin to converge.
Tackling class relations, art, commerce, and language, Tomasula illumines our own world while lucidly building his own. IN & OZ is a tale of the human condition that is as visually compelling as it is moving; a novel not only for fiction lovers, but also for artists of all stripes.
Steve Tomasula is professor if English at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of many books, including VAS: An Opera in Flatland and The Book of Portraiture, as well as TOC: A New-Media Novel, which received the Mary Shelly Award for Excellence in Fiction, and the eLit Best Book of the Year Award. His short fiction is collected in Once Human: Stories. He has contributed short fiction and essays to a wide variety of publications, including BOMB, McSweeney’s, and The Iowa Review, where he received the Iowa Prize for the most distinguished work published in any genre.