Screen Tests

"This isn’t, strictly, a novel, but I’d like to argue for a wider definition of the novel in the English-speaking and English-reading world. In other countries, a novel is often just thought of as any book that isn’t trying to pass itself off as a fact. Story collections, as we call them, enjoy a second-class citizenry for no good reason. I think this is a mistake. For this and many other reasons, I’m recommending Screen Tests as a counterfactual novel because it is a collection of writing written from a consistent point of view, that of Zambreno, as a character, in a certain mood. No, it’s not a novel with a single plot threading through the stories, but it is a novel if you can accept a single line of thought as no more or less valid than a plot. It’s a perfect book. One night some years ago I woke up at two in the morning in a very unusual moment of insomnia, and I went downstairs like a child on Christmas and I pulled this book from my shelf and I read the whole thing over the course of a few hours then I went back to bed. Best case of insomnia of all time."