Russell Persson
Author of the books The Way of Florida and These Threads Who Lead to Bramble
My second book, These Threads Who Lead to Bramble, will be published in February 2025 by Dzanc Books. (Buy at Bookshop.org)
The first American paperback edition of The Way of Florida will be published by Baobab Press in February 2025. The Way of Florida was originally published in 2017 by Little Island Press. (Buy at Bookshop.org)
Fiction and plays have appeared in The Quarterly, Egress, Unsaid Magazine, Paraphase Journal, 3:AM Magazine, New York Tyrant, Fantastic Floridas, Hotel Magazine, Territory.
<< Writing >>
The Book of Mark (From These Threads Who Lead to Bramble) (Paraphase Journal)
These Threads Who Lead to Bramble (short story) (Territory)
Bagatelles and Bell's Exit (Unsaid)
Excerpts from The Way of Florida (Hotel Magazine)
An Excerpt from The Way of Florida (Fantastic Floridas)
An Excerpt from The Way of Florida (New York Tyrant)
On Horses and on Sea and on the Island of Malhado (3AM)
From The Way of Florida (Unsaid)
The Bed Orange of Egon (Unsaid)
The Moon a Low Dish (Unsaid)
<< Interviews >>
Unsaid Magazine, December 2014
<< Reviews >>
These Threads Who Lead to Bramble, March 2025 (Heavy Feather Review)
These Threads Who Lead to Bramble, Starred Review, December 2024 (Publishers Weekly) (view image of review)
Lexicon Land, Jason Katz, June 2020 (Ploughshares)
The Way of Florida, September 2020 (Leaf by Leaf)
These Threads Who Lead to Bramble (short story) (The Oxford Student)
The Way of Florida, May 2018 (PaperBird)
The Deep Fuck We Found Ourselves In, Andrew Gallix, March 2018 (Review 31)
The Way of Florida, September 2017 (Hear Us Falling)
<< Contact >>
<< Praise for These Threads Who Lead to Bramble >>
"A book like this, with various personal histories, discussions of and responses to art, and what are at times intensely personal reminiscences from the author or his stand-in, is an attempt to map out what it means to exist today, as a fractured self in a fractured world. Persson—-like Stein and Sebald before him-—is certainly not going to be for everyone. But those who don’t want selfhood spoon-fed to them will find this book more than rewarding and worth the effort. It is a strange, beautiful work."
--Matt Martinson, Heavy Feather Review (Read full review)
"In this sublime essay collection, novelist Persson interrogates the unreliability and inventiveness of historical memory... This astonishes"
--Publishers Weekly, Starred Review (Read full review)
"By turns tender, erudite, and uncanny, the frequently biographical pieces collected here cover a lot of ground, from European composers to the history of the earth through road trips and onomastics. Haunted by undying dead fathers and ever drowning Ophelias, they are beautifully haunting. Russell Persson is a true original—-a latter-day alchemist, transmuting prosaic prose into unalloyed poetry. No one else writes like this; his style is sui generis."
--Andrew Gallix, author of Unwords
"As its title suggests, These Threads Who Lead to Bramble is not the kind of book where one thing predictably follows another. Anacoluthon, you might call it, if you were into that kind of thing. I suspect Russell Persson might have little time for such 'gussied-up' terminology. In truth, the serpentine sentences of this dazzling collection echo the connections that emerge between its subjects: memory and forgetting, love and loss, embodied genealogies of legacy and inheritance (the never simple passing down from fathers to sons of, say, admiration or resentment, the angle of a hairline or the precise timbre in which certain words might be spoken). Persson tells stories for which no other cartography can exist, recalls or imagines narratives that won't be verified, explores the myriad ways in which painting, drawing, photography and music might intervene in flows of meaning or in the construction of time. With memory a kind of erasure, and forgetfulness an ever-creative force, Persson gives us a twisting grammar of joyful tumblings. This is a book to read again and again."
--Tom Jeffreys, editor of Walking: Documents of Contemporary Art and author of The White Birch
<< Praise for The Way of Florida >>
"I'm not sure how a novel can feel ancient and entirely new at the same time. But in the hands of Russell Persson, The Way of Florida accomplishes this extraordinary feat with an artistry seldom seen in American fiction. This is a one of a kind book by a writer whose sentences dazzle with their strange and haunting music."
--Robert Lopez, author of All Back Full
"Reading The Way of Florida, one can nearly hear the Earth turn. Persson's polyphonous prose's spare but startling effects are truly one of a kind; it's a metaphysical masterpiece in serial miniature, exquisitely carved from the very gruesome core of how we're here."
--Blake Butler, author of Molly and Alice Knott
"Captivated by the author's trenchant, zigzagging, and reversing phrases, the reader finds themselves living the emotions of the men of a colonial expedition almost all of whom perish. There is grandeur in this tale.
--Alphonso Lingis, author of Dangerous Emotions and Deathbound Subjectivity
"Dark, dark, dark, this incessantly numinous account of the funding of the planetary genius in which, at any cost, the terrible genies of appropriation disport themselves on native soil, makes for an unprecedented work of language gorgeously twisted by the torsions of narrative necessity. It also makes for a great book. Entrancing in its choral pursuit of the realities of man's irresistible consumption of man, The Way of Florida rushes Russell Persson to the fore of notable American novelists, men and women who refuse the conventions handed them and confound the vicious lures of the marketplace. Ah, good conscience tells me I might instead have simply-—and thus more truly-—said, "I'm floored.""
--Gordon Lish
"Neil Armstrong hoped that someone, some day, would erase the footprints he had left on the moon. It is in this spirit that Russell Persson revisits the ill-fated Narváez expedition, covering the explorers' tracks before loosing his characters into lostness. With no backstory to speak of, or veritable narrative arc, The Way of Florida is a historical novel from which history has been all but excised, allowing a deep immersion in the here and now of lives conducted in extremis. Persson seems to have taken English back to the dawn of language, producing a newly-minted idiom that feels both antiquated and timeless. This outlandish debut is a singular masterpiece."
--Andrew Gallix
"The Way of Florida is, for the figures in the narrative, a doomed and reckless course. But for Russell Persson it is the manner by which he achieves absolute triumph. Here is a strange, bracing, wholly original novel, just when we need it."
--Sam Lipsyte
"Russell Persson does with Cabeza de Vaca's narrative what Nick Cave did with traditional murder ballads: hones it, gives it a sharp edge, and makes it seem almost uncomfortably close. An incantatory and compelling read, one that will stick with you long after the book is closed."
--Brian Evenson
"The Way of Florida is a brilliant take on the historical novel. The Narváez expedition continues to be a failed one, of course, but getting lost in Russell Persson's strange language feels like a beautiful and hallucinatory triumph."
--Michael Kimball