ANTHROPICA

Animal Riot Press, September 1 2020

“This book was very weird to me and I have to say that I didn’t understand any of it.” — Goodreads Reviewer

“Anthropica is what David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest might have been had it been about Ultimate Frisbee rather than tennis (and had it been 60 percent shorter). It’s manic and highly entertaining. Hollander’s line-by-line writing is syntactically complex, his choices of vocabulary and voice often pyrotechnic.” — Brian Evenson, The LA Review of Books

“David Hollander is the only fiction writer I’ve known to take an endlessly illogical premise to its logical end, encoding a totality of vision into every unit of meaning and revealing more about our working sense of reality than some writers of nonfiction. To survive Anthropica is to abandon a great many lies we tell ourselves, replacing them with the hauntingly unspeakable facts of our complexity, especially our capacities for love and destruction.” — Dina Peone, The Brooklyn Rail

“Hollander is elevated but not esoteric, dense but not impenetrable. His words and phrasings are so sharp they risk breaking skin… He is, himself, creating a world on the page out of the energy of his own artistic desire.” — Nathaniel Drenner, Independent Book Review

“[Anthropica] is a sprawling and ambitious force, a mobius strip of fiction whose virtues are impossible to ignore.” — Jared Pollen, 3:AM

“I didn’t appreciate the continuous use of foul language and sexual dialogue included in nearly every character’s story.” — Rachel Dehning, Manhattan Book Review

“David Hollander has written a great big postmodern novel that supplies no shortage of intellectual challenge, delivers page after page of consistently ecstatic prose, and culminates in a dizzying display of conceptual acrobatics.” — Hugh Sheehy, The Rumpus

“Hollander has crafted a high-concept work that never loses track of its characters’ humanity.” — Matthew Duffus, Rain Taxi

“David Hollander's gorgeous hyperbolic prose voice contains a great many things, for example, a horror about the excesses of the contemporary, and a fearlessness about accepting all of these excesses. Beneath the syntactical dazzle, that is, Hollander sees like a visionary and he feels like an empath. Anthropica is more evidence of his tragic and tragicomic excellence.” -- Rick Moody, Author of Hotels of North America and The Ice Storm

“What a pleasure to watch a writer of David Hollander's gifts really "lay out" (to employ the ultimate Frisbee parlance of one of his protagonists), to put it all on the line in service to this majestic mysterious artifact, this deeply felt and sometimes madcap Moebius strip of a book. Anthropica is a philosophically vibrant and profoundly funny novel, and a good old-fashioned systems yarn to boot. Space-time, Earth-life, and human (and inhuman) desire and meaning have a worthy bard in David Hollander, and existence gets its dark, beautiful due in this rapturous work.” - Sam Lipsyte, Author of The Ask and Venus Drive

"Anthropica is that rare, category-defying book that is pure enchantment: structurally dazzling, philosophically profound, slyly funny, and stealthily moving. This is a book to read and read again, discovering deeper levels every time." -- Dawn Raffel, Author of The Strange Case of Dr. Couney and The Secret Life of Objects

“David Hollander's Anthropica is equal parts Goldberg Variations and Rube Goldberg machine — every slotted sentence holds a surprise. It's a dizzying counterpointer and amplifier and constellatory of voices, a mad music box where his stunning, skilled absurdism laughs as it aches and mostly just sings some of the most beautiful songs.” — David Ryan, Author of Animals in Motion



"Anthropica is like the NYTimes crossword on Monday: a little bit difficult but entirely rewarding.  Difficult because it mirrors back the dire state of our world, and rewarding because of the sentence-by-sentence beauty, the crisp creation of characters, the masterful interior voices, the fully-imagined, willing world, the smooth soft underbelly of the story with its sparkling viscera hanging out.  Plus, it's funny."   -- Jo Ann Beard, Author of The Boys of My Youth and In Zanesville

Press for Anthropica