Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours

If Kerouac were writing today, his work might look something like this—and despite the title, many of the stories are indeed ours, as they focus on love and loss, pain and yearning.… This is a fierce, untamed, riotous book—and from the first page you’ll know you’re not reading Jane Austen.’
—Kirkus

'...[I]t is apparent that Goebel has announced himself as a proud new talent and of stronger voice than most of the writers, bless them, working to further the forms of the novel.'
—Southeast Review

'Goebel’s tour de force swiftly seduced me, and I set aside my own experience in order to ride his loop out past the farther planets and back to the heart’s interior.'
—Brooklyn Rail

'Goebel is clearly a very talented writer, and his experiment in this collection is noble.'
—Publishers Weekly 

 

Luke B. Goebel’s Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours (Fiction Collective Two) is a thunderous, fantastical debut novel.’
—Interview

‘...the pleasures of Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours come so fast and frequent you’ll even overlook that there are, actually, only thirteen stories in the table of contents.’
—Electric Literature

‘It’s a book I carried around for weeks and whose pages, which I often returned to again and again, are rippled, dog-eared, and covered in ink and underlines.’
—The Rumpus



'About twenty pages into Luke B. Goebel's Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours, I realized I was reading with one hand holding my forehead and one balled at my waist, kind of clenched, and gazing down into the paper like a man soon to be converged upon. Goebel's testimony comes on like that: engrossing, fanatical, full of private grief, and yet, at the same time, charismatic, tender, and intrepid, aglow with more spirit than most Americans have the right to wield.'
—Blake Butler, author of Nothing and Scorch Atlas

'I would call this, fey as it sounds, 'American bard yawp,' not so much concerned with what it means as whether I have stolen it or not, and I would hazard that this Luke Goebel feller, if we may pretend for a itty bit the word is not exactly pejorative, is 'insane.' We have here the fine coherence of the not-deliberately incoherent, a proud-standing mess, like a Faulkner mess. It's after the 'the giant American heart' that Kerouac and Kesey were after in their Neal Cassidys, you have Burroughs and Bukoswki rants, Ashbery misconnections, Hannah whiskey whistling, and spinning up from it once in a while the fist of the perfectly put. If this is a work of non-fiction, it is a miracle that its author is alive. If it is fiction, it is the miracle. By my eye, it is not made up. It is received, has been done to its author, like a beating, and he is not unhappy at how he's taken the beating.'
—Padgett Powell, Whiting Writers' Award winner and author of Edisto and You Me

'I'm in love with language again because Luke B. Goebel is not afraid to take us back through the gullet of loss into the chaos of words. Someone burns a manuscript in Texas; someone's speed sets a life on fire; a heart is beaten nearly to death, the road itself is the trip, a man is decreated back to his animal past--better, beyond ego, beautiful, and look: there's an American dreamscape left. There's a reason to go on.'
—Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Chronology of Water and Dora: A Headcase

Luke may be one of the last few geniuses we have left in this life. I mean that. He’s a good boy with a lot of pain in his heart.’
—Scott McClanahan, author of Crapalachia and Hill William

‘The protagonist of Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours doesn’t make it easy for us, channeling as he does Barry Hannah and Denis Johnson by way of Rick Bass and Dennis Hopper, and self-presenting as yet another damaged romantic who thinks it’s always time to play the cowboy, skating in and out of sense. He can’t see right, and he’s haunted by nearly everything. He’s trying to open up or shut himself down or at least get a hold of himself. He’s trying to make do with what he’s done, while he reminds us that we’re all, one way or another, in that position.’
—Jim Shepard, National Book Award finalist and author of the short story collections You Think That’s Bad and Like You’d Understand, Anyway