Abstract
History is strange, but then again so is the present. The several stories and partial novel collected in And yet there is no contradiction here are seeped in this strangeness, whether they be in the American West of the 1860s or Tampa, Florida, in early 2012. Characters collect flowerpots full of fingers, attempt to enter paintings, and dine on the ground with pigs. They search for perfect sentences and pine after sea monsters. Most crucially though, they slip from real worlds into abstractions, into impossible worlds which, through the inability of language to capture reality, seem both completely real and fully not. Yes and no, at the same time. Curbing a number of distancing effects from Philip K Dick, Ursula K LeGuin, Franz Kafka, Lewis Nordan, and Robero Bolaño, And yet there is no contradiction here attempts to sweetly convince its reader it’s okay to engage themselves fully with the fiction of the text—to accept the strangeness.