JRZDVLZ

“Propulsive, harrowing, surprisingly humorous, and heartfelt, JRZDVLZ is a masterful re-imagining of one of America’s most beguiling—and now, thanks to Lee Klein, most memorable—myths. Literary wizardry at its very best.”

—Matthew Vollmer, author of Gateway to Paradise

“Lee Klein’s JRZDVLZ is as ingenious and compelling a composite as the Jersey Devil itself: part bildungsroman, part travelogue, part urban history, part fable, part mythopoeic romance that’s also a profound meditation on isolation and a searing document of self-invention. Benjamin Franklin would be delighted and disturbed. Imagine a shape-shifting, immortal Elephant Man stalking the pages of Ragtime and The Sot-Weed Factor and Mason & Dixon, and you’ll have an idea of what lies within this extraordinary novel.”

—Josh Emmons, author of A Moral Tale and Other Moral Tales

The Jersey Devil is New Jersey’s answer to Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster. According to a legend dating back to a few decades before the American Revolution, which may have in fact been created by Ben Franklin, the thirteenth son of the Leeds family transformed at birth into a hideous monster—a composite of various animals, with the snout of a dog, horns of a ram, the wings of a bat, the torso of a kangaroo, the tail of a rat, the legs of a heron, and the hooves of a donkey—devoured his mother and siblings, and commenced three centuries of haunting the Pine Barrens . . . and in this novel, eventually settling in human form in a genteel central New Jersey town where he bags groceries at a supermarket.

Just as the legendary monster in question is an amalgam of many species, JRZDVLZ the novel flirts with many genres: among its many identities, it’s a multi-generational coming-of-age story; a fascinatingly detailed and well-researched historical novel; a comedy; a fantasy; who knows, perhaps the start of a movement of “New Jersey magical realism”; and a deeply inward work of psychology and sociology. Beautifully autumnal and reflective, it is written in a gorgeous, slightly archaic language that feels like it has soaked in the Pine Barrens for a century or two. And, all too appropriate for the trouble of our current historical moment, it traces the violence and scapegoating on the surface of our experience, personal and social, to the carefully concealed wellsprings of our discontent.

Lee Klein is the author of J RZDVLZ (Sagging Meniscus Press, 2017), The Shimmering Go-Between (Atticus Books, 2014), Thanks and Sorry and Good Luck: Rejection Letters from the Eyeshot Outbox (Barrelhouse Books, 2014), and Incidents of Egotourism in the Temporary World (Better Non Sequitur, 2004). His translation of Horacio Castellanos Moya's Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador (New Directions, 2016) received a 2015 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Award and was named one of New Yorker literary critic James Wood's four favorite books of 2016. His stories, essays, translations, and reviews have appeared in 3AM, Agni, The Barcelona Review, Barrelhouse, The Black Warrior Review, Brick, Canteen, Full Stop, Harper's, Hobart, The Normal School, PEN America, Vice, and many other sites, journals, and anthologies, including The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2007. Since 1999, he's edited Eyeshot.net, one of the first weird little lit sites. A graduate of Oberlin College and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he lives in South Philadelphia with his daughter and wife. He can be found online at http://litfunforever.com.