Adrift in a Vanishing City
WINNER OF THE 2016 ERIC HOFFER AWARD FOR BEST IN SMALL PRESS, Adrift in a Vanishing City is a fiction collection in which characters from one story cross texts to greet characters in another.
"What’s extraordinary here ... what recommends and finally makes such work more than commendable, what renders it a small landmark in the sedimentation of new form in fiction, is a quality of language, a surface that signals that the structure of anything and everything that surface evokes beyond it is simply other than what we have grown used to. [...] Nothing is careless about this writing at all.”
— Samuel R. Delany
“Adrift is a book that rewards multiple readings and demands to be quoted, as the multilayered construction of Czyz's prose enables Adrift to speak toward those depths of mind and memory that tend to elude language. Readers should rejoice that Czyz has explored this city and has returned from the underworld with a song to recover the vanishing dimensions of ourselves."
— Matt Badura, Review of Contemporary Fiction
“There is something of Virginia Woolf’s toxic perfume, the tincture of bemused sadness, the glorying in the jewel-tones of the half-healed bruise, the thing that—in being left one-quarter undone—is therefore promising forever. Here is a song to the weird sweetness behind loving the wrong person perfectly.”
— Allan Gurganus, citation for 1994 William Faulkner-William Wisdom Prize for short story
“Prayer, as ritual act, communal, self-searching and laced with desire, is an apt metaphor for thinking about this work. [...] Whether prayer or not, that is the sort of pleasure brought to and imparted from these pages. A kind of benediction, like the sound of screen doors or moth wings, the feel of a lover’s hands mid-love-making, the smell of a proper red sauce being slowly stewed. To a book so thick with such things, I can only say, Amen."
— Spencer Dew, decomP Magazine
“The book boasts rampant humor and wit, tremendous moments of graphic action, and strenuous, existentialist discussions of disillusionment, but it requires of its reader an open-hearted, even mystical, earnestness. It demands we remember that how we read is of utmost importance, that reading can and must be an act of caring—that reading teaches us how to care about relationships, communities, contexts, and the unfathomable power of words.”
— Nate Liederbach, Logos Journal
“Deeply romantic (in the best sense) and darkly evocative, Czyz's lush style explores regions well beyond simple narrative, probing the constantly shifting, oblique connections between failure, memory and the forever-incomplete nature of human desire. A moody, gorgeous and formally innovative collection, Adrift in a Vanishing City deserves a wide audience among readers who understand that fiction is about more than getting a character from one room to the next.”
—Greg Burkman, The Seattle Times
“Sentences are not straightforward or transparent, but long and labyrinthine, like intriguing yet shadowy dreams. The writing, more like poetry than prose, calls attention to language, to the fullness of a word, a sentence, with the purpose of expressing inexpressible emotions and experiences. Think of Proust’s Remembrance of things Past or Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury … lyrical and pensive, an odd and often beautiful portrait of longing.”
— Capper Nichols, Minnesota Daily
Details
Publisher: Rain Mountain Press
Publish Date: November 5, 2025
Pages: 248
Language: English
Categories: Short Story Collections, Contemporary LIterature & Fiction
Excerpt from “slow Dive”
Heaven has left a wind tunnel in our hearts and the always-trying-to-fill-it, the always-looking-to-get-there, is what leaves us facedown beside the curb or stretched out naked on the floor, the cigarette burning down to the filter between our fingers, the candle a hardening reddish puddle waiting for our failure to be pressed onto it.
We need an instrument to study the trajectory of our prayers, we worshipers from afar, in time, in distance measured (by that same instrument) from the angel-realm to Earth, from sunny pleasure domes and a cloud signed and numbered like a limited-edition print to Pantisocrasy and the Commune of 1871. What can we drop from there to here and what can we take with us and what will be waiting for us there?
And what is to be done with those of us who have an aching for a myth to support our lives, a backbone, an yggdrasil, whose roots curl like a fist around our troubled hearts, whose leafy branches disappear in the strange horizon where vision blends with the sky lording over it, the pale moon and occasional lumps of burning rock-iron-copper angels who fall through it, gather at our feet as dust that has traveled light years to be stepped on and forgotten except for that one phosphorescent moment when we knew to make a wish before it was already too late. And maybe that is what you’re doing up late at night, inventing one, crawling up the backbone as you add vertebra to vertebra, Jacques and the beanstalk, where does it lead and who is the giant waiting at the top? And how heavy are those golden eggs anyway? If we don't want the trouble of using knobby bone as the rungs of a ladder, if we allow it to be watered down (afraid of heights), we paint in oil, we pastel, we draw angels in the air, stamp them out of plastic, print them on comforting cards to send to one another, put them on the tops of Christmas trees, make them in the snow, in mashed potatoes, and compose music to mimic the sound of their wings beating from heaven to heaven.