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ABOUT POP!

When Mark Polanzak was seventeen, his father spontaneously combusted on the tennis court, vanishing forever.

It is also entirely possible that he died of a heart attack.

Either way, his father’s death is a story Polanzak spends much of his life trying to get right. POP! captures the absurdity and authenticity of the grieving process with grace and humor.

PRAISE FOR POP!

“A one-of-a-kind story of grief.”
—Kirkus

“Here is finally an example of everything a 21st-century book should be: both story and essay, entertaining and analytical, personal, ambitious, tender, outward-looking, rule-breaking, heartbreaking, funny, formally-inventive, and entirely unlike anything I’ve ever read.  Here is literary potential realized in all its honest and imperfectly perfect glory. Here is an author struggling to make sense out of the senseless and bringing all he has to bear to the task. POP! is the book we’ve been waiting for. It is exactly what I want to read.”
—Rachel Yoder, bestselling author of Nightbitch

“Mark Polanzak's POP! melds fiction and nonfiction to tell a story of loss and grief that feels so real it transcends genre labels—both a penetrating account of his father's death and an ambitious attempt to remake the memoir form. Polanzak is a fresh and energetic voice, an heir to Dave Eggers and Nick Flynn, and he's written the most innovative and engaging book I've read in ages.”
—Justin St. Germain, author of Son of a Gun

“An insightful, vulnerable look at the grieving process…Polanzak gives readers not only a powerful narrative, but an example of just how important hybridity can be to our conception of what a story really is”
—Small Press Book Review

“Polanzak's voice is clear, but his mind is restless and the power of POP! is born from that restlessness.  In his hands, there is no one story, no one narrative, no one reality, no easy answer.  This is a beautiful, exhilarating book, one I won't soon forget.”
—Lucas Mann, author of Class A: Baseball in the Middle of Everywhere

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

POP! is Mark Polanzak's first book. He teaches English at the Berklee College of Music and is a founding editor of draft: the journal of process. Runner-up for the 2014 Italo Calvino Prize for fabulist fiction, his stories have appeared in Third Coast, The Southern Review, and The American Scholar, and other publications. He received his MFA from the University of Arizona. Find him online at www.draftjournal.com.