Fiction. DEEP ELLUM is a novel of beauty and power, about family and transcending family, lives unwinding even as they tangle together. Brandon Hobson writes luminescent prose of hard-edged, quiet intensity. His narrator owns a voice at once mysterious and intimate, like a long-lost, slightly suspect friend returning to tell you how the world really is. In a mere 120 pages, Hobson fashions a universe so vivid you can read it in one sitting and stagger back to the world entranced.–Jerry Stahl

Both dreamy and gritty, bleak and oblique, DEEP ELLUM treads the sketchy margins of Dallas, following one young man as he tries to reconnect with his family and reconcile his mystifying past with his uncertain present. Brandon Hobson’s mordant portrait of the lost and damaged among us recalls the estranged, drifting world of Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son.–Stewart O'Nan