Bathing the Lion

"Jonathan Carroll's a writer whose power defies description and I've lavishly praised him as a hyperrealist, a fantasist, and Americas leading practitioner of magical realism--I don't know what all that means except that he is one hell of a writer. His work seems like a combination of the Grimm brothers seasoned with a dash of Calvino and Kafka, a pinch of Chabon and a bright banana leaf thrown into the mixture by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, yet he writes in a league of his own, comparable to no one writing today. He's like a Rubicks cube without the colored tiles spinning out of control, trying to say the unsayable things. He's always excited me in the same way my new discovery George R. R. Martin does in his "Game of Thrones." Jonathan Carroll's new novel "Bathing the Lion" is the latest tower in his singular castle of fiction." --Pat Conroy

""Bathing the Lion" is a departure for Jonathan Carroll: a work of surrealist world-building, which reminded me at times of both Philip K Dick and of Julio Cortazar. Carroll unpeels what it means to be human, and why something would pretend to be human in a book that is as exciting as it is thoughtful." - Neil Gaiman