It's Hard to Say... See more

Give me unlikable narrators and holographic selves remembered through strange artifacts: Bob Ross Chia Pets talismanic jars of tonsils oversized alligators. Give me Claire Hopples epistolary novel where formal gestures towards intimacy are undermined by the content. Each chapter is addressed to someone (coworkers old friends former neighbors family members strangers the speaker herself); intimacy collides with estrangement to alienate what it seems to draw near. With one foot on the sustain-pedal of second-person address Hopples voice is stereoscopic conversational baroque displaced by questions of power and perspective. What do we know about shared experiences and closeness? What is friendship in collapsed contexts? What is witness when our own take is the primary allegiance? Color me haunted disturbed and thoroughly fascinated. - Alina Stefanescu author of RibaldWritten in prose thats poetic and rambling like a Bob Dylan song ITS HARD TO SAY is inhabited by characters youd swear youve met before: too strange to be fictional and too funny to resist recounting to a friend. - Shannon McLeod author of WhimsyClaire Hopple writes with such concision and style I had to scrape my jaw from the floor after reading its hard to say. Its hard to say just how good this little book truly is without sounding hyperbolic but Ill try. It is great. - Troy James Weaver author of TemporalAcerbic observant and wise Claire Hopple makes magic with the flash epistolary form translating the experimental into an emotionally affecting lovely book. - Chaya Bhuvaneswar author of White Dancing Elephants a PEN/ American Bingham Prize finalist.