Sonny
by Mary Burger (2005)

Mary Burger, in a stunning feat of prose that is part testimony, part excursion of thought, makes of time and language processes that build and destroy at once. Moving between the individual and the collective, Sonny shows us a way to make new resemblances and new subjectivities out of what we’ve lost. This inventive portrait of relation forms and reforms itself into a history that remembers, that recalls and echoes the narrator’s desire to “replace the story with itself”.

Praise for Sonny:

“Now Mary [Burger] has proved me right by writing what is flat out the best novel I've read to come out of the new writing since.... Well, you’d have to go back to Kathy Acker & Jack Kerouac to find another performance on such a high level.
With its micro paragraphs, reading Sonny feels like going through a book of old, still photographs, tableaux that by themselves present images of posed life, but which collectively create a portrait of incredible richness – if you can use that phrase to characterize a world defined by barrenness, absence & loss.”
—Ron Silliman

“In bits and starts, by simple steps, Mary Burger assembles lives at first surprising for their simplicity but which quickly and quietly prove themselves struggling under the weight of the 20th century’s most difficult discovery. In its ability to move from an abstractive distance to the pained particulars of individual lives, to move from facts and theory to the bareness of a boy and girl fumbling out the logic of a changed world, Sonny is a moving book, unlike anything else out there.”
—Brian Evenson

“Cohesive and eloquently paced, this is an original debut novella from an extremely gifted writer”
—Anne Waldman