Not Anywhere, Just Not

Boy meets Girl, Boy marries Girl, and years later Boy mysteriously disappears in this Gordon Lish-style novel.

People are disappearing. And when they return, they can't say where they've been: "I was nowhere. . . . And then one day I was back."

At the heart of Not Anywhere, Just Not is a middle-aged couple who still consider themselves to be a boy and a girl, like they were when they first met. One day, like thousands of people around the world, the boy vanishes, and the girl is left to wait, wonder, and worry. Who is he? Who is she, now, approaching sixty? Who were they together? And who will they be when or if he reappears?

This is a world where every morning the cat gets fed and the coffee gets made, but also one in which gigantic words fall from the sky, God stands outside in the cold without a hat, angels ride the subway, and dreams whisper from far away, like something loud trapped in a jar. Not Anywhere, Just Not is a mysterious wind rustling the lexicon of suburban living into strange new iterations. Between the banalities of the domestic sphere, impossibilities drift like dandelion fluff, making the familiar seem strange and the strange seem familiar. Ken Sparling confronts us with the small dramas of our lives and the language we struggle with to express them, bringing us to the precipice of accepted ideas and allowing us to see, with dread and wonder, what might be coming for us all.

"Ken Sparling is a brilliant writer and this book, like all his books, is a beauty. Sparling chronicles the times I fear most-the moments of loneliness, of loss, of ennui-and somehow makes them seem worthwhile, even wondrous, and often flat-out funny. His work makes life look livable, which makes him a wizard to me." - Derek McCormack, Judy Blame's Obituary

"A gorgeous rendition of the domestic uncanny, Not Anywhere, Just Not is an ostensibly quiet book that slowly and carefully unnerves and unsettles you--both because of its precise swapping out of reality and because of just how familiar it so often seems. All of us, Sparling seems to say, are on the verge of vanishing at any moment." - Brian Evenson, author of Song for the Unravelling of the World