Minnows: A Shattered Novel

Minnows: A Shattered Novel was built by hand before it was written down. Jonathan Lyons cut his draft into blocks and columns, pinned the fragments across the walls of his basement, and reassembled the exploded narrative into a unified whole. The subtitle is the method: a shattered novel, put back together so the seams stay visible.

What the pieces reassemble into is the story of two brothers whose summer is detonated by trauma. The cut-up does not scatter the book; it concentrates it, letting the reader feel the breakage as form rather than read about it as plot. The seams the method leaves on the page are the point: a novel that proves its subject by carrying its own fracture in the architecture.