Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Cardinal Numbers

Cardinal Numbers

Broun, Hob

Paperback

General FictionLiterary Fiction

ISBN10: 1940853540
ISBN13: 9781940853543
Publisher: Calamari Press
Published: Oct 31 2025
Pages: 168
Weight: 0.33
Height: 0.36 Width: 5.00 Depth: 7.00
Language: English
The nineteen audacious fictions that comprise Cardinal Numbers are evidence of the gorgeously disruptive mind of Hob Broun. They arrived to us posthumously, not only out of the pressure of an exceptional and subversive intelligence but also out of a kind of tension quite special to those whose lives must be lived in the face of calamitously punishing circumstances-in the case of Hob Broun, quadriplegia complicated by the horrendous physical decline immobility necessarily brings on. Such conditions of existence produced in Hob Broun a living instance of the Beckettian principle I cannot go on; I must go on, and accordingly made of his fiction a kind of literary embodiment of these opposing statements. To be sure, it is this very irony that suffuses the stories in this book, and that imparts to them the heart-aching air of hope struggling between moments of its being successively suffocated and set aflame. Take, for example, the beleaguered figure of old Schenck at the close of Ice Water-on the one hand, moving slowly, like someone his age, planting both feet on a step before the next move down, but by virtually the next sentence believing, on the other hand, that everything is expressible, achievable, possible. It is in just these terms that each of these entries-even the more wildly madcap of them, whose playfulness and raucous revision of the short-story form are, at bottom, more a kind of whistling in the dark than a demonic urge to overturn convention-should be read: as a map of the will of their author to keep on keeping on, keep trucking, keep marching, no matter what. Taken in these terms, Hob Broun's story and Hob Broun's stories apply to us all, right down to the very last period, even if the torment in our lives has not been written so grievously large.

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